Their life force – the life force which powers you – is used to create robots which burrow through coral and dig new paths for the triangle mines, imbued with life of their own to shock and destroy, to follow and from which they eradicate the undersea life. To give of ourselves, of our lives, to help heal the rifts we are cutting into nature.ĪBZÛ simply presents this in a more literal manner, giving us this story of a diver who uses his own life to return the oceans to their glory.Īnd his adversary? The mechanical world of men, who took the Diver People and turned them into something wrong, something adversarial to the oceans. The other way, and the way ABZÛ takes this, is that since we are the only self-aware creature with such abilities as to recognise the problems we are causing, it is up to us to do all we can to reverse the changes we are making.
It is this argument which leads to overfishing, battery farming and stripping of the environment. I’ve seen this taken two different ways the first, that since we are in charge, we may do with these animals and plants what we wish, they are at our mercy.
The whole plot – the quest between five of these temples to give life to the sea – is reminiscent of the religious notion of stewardship: that we are the caretakers of this planet and thus are responsible for all life on Earth. Thus we have the temples of the “Diver People” – that’s what I shall call them for the remainder of this article – which reveal the story through beautiful mosaics on the walls, depicting their rituals of renewal and ocean life.Īnd then we have the Ocean Temples themselves, portals to a realm of a deeper, more mysterious sea where the diver gives of itself to reinvigorate the underwater life. We must take the story from the environment.ĪBZÛ has no cutscenes beyond those small moments where you must give of yourself at the mysterious undersea temples, so the story must come naturally along the linear pathway of the game. We infer from the music, it tells us how we should feel about our environment, our situation, but it does not tell us the story. The music is a huge, vital aspect to the story.īut there’s more to it than that. The only sound is your swimming and the warning tones of the mines performing a discordant melody. And then, as you dive deeper and reach the volcanic vents spewing smog into the ocean, you come across the triangular mines, traps which discharge a powerful electric shock against you if you get too close. The music takes a darker turn as you encounter primitive, primordial creatures and begin to uncover hints that the mysterious triangular robot things perhaps aren’t the good guys. You get this wonderful, beckoning melody which draws you into the world and sets you on the path, and as you continue through the areas and encounter more and more bizarre, unnatural elements the music begins to acquire an edge of foreboding. It invites you into the world, floating along with you and reassuring you that this environment is safe and beautiful. In the beginning the music is light, open, exploratory. What makes ABZÛ a powerful visual story? How does it tell its story without giving us any exposition through language? You float around underwater, exploring vibrant environments and slowly uncovering the story through images and inferences. Nobody speaks, there are no signs, no language but the visual and melodic. So without further ado, let’s splash down into the murky, wavy world of ABZÛ…
How does ABZÛ signal the correct path to further the story?.So to talk about ABZÛ, we need to examine it from a few different angles: This is an important question to ask where story is concerned, because ABZÛ and similar games crop up from time to time, games where there is no narration and the player must piece together the clues to the story from what they can infer through the environment, character interaction (no matter how mute the characters), and ambient sound. So what happens when your story-driven game has none? Several weeks ago I talked about Dr Langeskov and how important narration is to story in games. You do not have to watch that to understand this, but ABZÛ is a very beautiful game so I suggest you do anyway. This article is an accompaniment to my video SPOILER WARNING: ABZÛ.