Note: The following article contains major spoilers for ABZÛ.

ABZÛ is an underwater exploration game devoted to celebrating the most diverse and extraordinary examples of life in Earth's oceans. Directed by former thatgamecompany art director Matt Nava, ABZÛ feels like the most natural step forwards for Nava's career. As he had already shaped Flower, a game in tune with a lush environment on Earth, and Journey, a game set in an arid climate, it made sense for him to then continue onto another environment on Earth that's less land-based. Nava describes looking towards the ocean to break from the patterns of Journey. ABZÛ still has a similar form and some of the same emotive and thematic properties that Nava's previous game did, but the difference between Journey and ABZÛ is very much the difference between their habitats.

ABZÛ is not just a game set in the sea, but a game that understands what it means to be in the sea and wants to teach the player the same. Nava describes the ocean as an "integral part" of the lives of the developers at Giant Squid and research for the game involved scuba diving, visiting aquariums, and studying fish behaviour. The ocean is not just the window dressing of ABZÛ, it is ABZÛ, with promotion for the game informing us that "Ab" and "Zû" are ancient words meaning "To know water". Through the eyes of ABZÛ "knowing" the ocean means both understanding what it's like to move in the water and viewing the ocean as a wellspring of life.

Given the terrible reputation of underwater levels in games, ABZÛ might seem to be getting off on the wrong foot because it's all underwater level, but its unique perspective on the setting sets right what's been wrong with underwater levels in games. When games get the underwater level wrong, it's usually because they take a model for player movement that's snappy and fun, then have the water level restrict that movement. Motion can become slowed, movement can become less precise and more floaty, jumps may get you less height, or sometimes you have to laboriously mash the A button to get anywhere. These frustrating quirks are a result of games aiming to switch up the physics and give the underwater setting some grounding in the gameplay, but that comes at the expense of unhindered movement. In ABZÛ, water does not weigh down otherwise fine movement; Giant Squid start with a movement model that's tuned to work underwater.

ABZÛ allows you free movement in three dimensions without the current or gravity dragging you in any one particular direction and in this way plays up the enormity of the sea and the opportunity for exploration within it. If you want to, you can cut ahead through the water with some speed, but it's also possible to just float there and take it all in. Some other games with underwater levels have edged in the right direction with 3D movement, but unflexible cameras and bad turning circles can also damage the experience. ABZÛ not only has a camera which feels appropriately independent from your direction of movement, but you can also turn on a dime. At more than one point in the game, you walk across solid ground and find you have a lot less mobility than usual, turning the standard land-sea relationship in a game on its head and making you feel more at home in the blue.

The game also connects you to the sea by giving the player character an appearance like a scuba diver, by having your movement pattern mimic those of the fish, and by placing mosaics in the environment that suggest that your character or someone resembling them had an important part to play in an ancient ocean-worshipping culture. It's possible for characterisation in a story to be a distraction from the world that story takes place in, but ABZÛ's characterisation is about more greatly investing you in its world, it never stalls your exploration, and an unassuming appearance for the diver keeps the player character from pulling attention away from the setting. Making the protagonist a robot also allows the developers to neatly explain why you never have to worry about running of oxygen down there.

To match your movement in this ocean in full 3D, the game frequently makes sure there are flora and fauna to find across all three axes of its environments. It features 200 species of fish and can have up to 10,000 of them on screen at any one time. While animals in other games are often made to stand out as individual objects, the schools of fish in ABZÛ frequently appear more like clouds in the surrounding space. The game makes sure to balance to these schools in each area against solitary aquatic creatures like giant turtles or swordfish that, like more traditional video game animals, will move about on their own. These larger lifeforms are a way to get in touch with the nature here as opposed to just being a passive observer.

You can grab onto these animals and either let them guide you or control their direction, and as you swim together, your movements unify. It's like a more direct version of the mechanic from Gone Home where you would connect with people by touching their belongings. The game suggests that this contact lets you "know" these creatures by revealing the names of them when you hang onto them. Just as you can feel close to these animals by moving with them, there are sections where you can feel close to the currents themselves because they move you, blasting you ahead through tunnels and trenches. Here, again, physical contact is used to create a sense of togetherness as fish caught up in these currents light up and follow you when touched. There's a comparable mechanic which lets you send a pulse of light out into the water prompting any aquatic robots following you respond with their own pulse. It may seem like a small thing, but providing even the most basic means of communication with characters can make the player feel an attachment to them.

Of course, a 3D game about the ocean that doesn't get the ocean itself right wouldn't mean much, but the artists at Giant Squid give the sea the same broad range of colours that they give the fish, and they make sure you notice it. ABZÛ frequently opts for scenes in which one particular colour overtakes the screen and that can be a blue, but it can also be a red or yellow, and even when colours are more conventional, blues or greens frequently act as a background against which the multi-coloured fish pop out. Within these scenes, there are multiple different perspectives you can take on these fish. You can swim around in their general vicinity, but you can also "meditate" to flick between close-ups of each fish in the area without having to move about a lot. It's a knowing recreation of the focus and clarity you get on something when you meditate on it.

The meditation is also part of the game's invocation of religion based around the ocean. See also: The choral singing in the soundtrack, the temples you find, and the celestial fields you fall into where you appear to give your life force back to the surrounding animals. While many creation myths speak about primaeval waters, the game's fictional ocean religion draws most specifically from early Mesopotamian faiths. In the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the gods emerged from a divine water, and two of the original gods were themselves water gods, "Apsu" being one of them.^[1] For the Sumerians, "Abzu" was the temple of Enki, the god who created human beings, as well as the name for the subterranean cosmic waters from which all water sources on the surface of the earth flowed.^[2][3] In Theresa Bane's Encyclopedia of Imaginary and Mythical Places, the author writes:

"To travel to and descend into [Abzu] is a means by which the god can claim me ("divine power")".

At the very least, ABZÛ is pulling inspiration from these myths, but it could also be that the ocean featured in the game is the Sumerians' Abzu. Even more likely is that the cosmic sea we find in the underwater shrines is that Abzu. Either way, this results in the interpretation that it's a divine experience we have in ABZÛ's sea. Like Journey, ABZÛ incorporates religion not because it's trying to make an argument for religion as a logical way to explain the universe, but because it's trying to put us in the shoes of people far earlier in history and give our surroundings a sense of grandeur. By replicating the attitudes the ancient Mesopotamians had towards the water and aquatic life, ABZÛ hopes that we might also treat these things with awe and reverence, and feel like we're connecting with something greater than ourselves. The soundtrack itself also makes reference to the Enuma Elish with titles of tracks alternating between being the scientific names for various species of fish and quoting from the first tablet of the creation epic.^[4] However, this naming scheme may be at odds with composer Austin Wintory's approach to the soundtrack as a collection of music.

Wintory has stated that he sees the role of a soundtrack being not to convey a setting but to act as an emotional conduit. It's a potentially controversial view, but this belief about the role of the composer is probably why this soundtrack is so unflinchingly emotive. ABZÛ's soundtrack also doesn't have theme music or any liberally employed leitmotifs. This leaves it sounding a lot more like the contemporary classical music that's made for its own sake rather than a video game soundtrack, and it lets the music continuously forge into new waters to keep up with game's ever-shifting art and story. Like Nava and Wintory's previous title, ABZÛ is never happy being static; it wants to be a journey. Not only do we see the colour palette change as we progress, but religious architecture makes up more of our surroundings, the game adopts more of a story, and by the late game, we are encountering species that are extinct in the real world like the Ichthyosaurus and the Trilobite. The further we get into ABZÛ, the further back in time we seem to be reaching into Earth's oceans.

Giant Squid also provide a revealing example of how games often alternate between linear sections and open areas, achieving different goals with each. Linear areas often have a sense of forward momentum and can be more tightly scripted which creates intensity. Open areas give the player more agency in where they go can and what they do; this provides more freedom and often a more laid back feel. In ABZÛ's case, the open areas are even relaxing. Whether we think of them as linear or open-world, most action or adventure video games, like ABZÛ, use a mix of open and linear areas with the contrast between the two better distinguishing the features of each. A more surprising structural choice in ABZÛ is that upward slope of how much narrative means to the game as it goes.

While many stories have twists, the twist in ABZÛ is that it has a story at all. Characters and histories slowly rise out of what was just an aquatic-themed relaxation chamber for the first chapter or two. Our foes in this story are metallic pyramids covered in industrial ornamentation, capable of creating dangerous electrical fields. Running into hostile antagonists comes as a particular surprise after the tranquillity of the deep before it. For the pyramids' sections of the game, the colour palette changes to a fierce red, and the soundtrack moves from stretched-out orchestral waves to glib electronic bursts.

The pyramids are toxic to surrounding wildlife and eventually kill a Great White Shark. In the game's conclusion, we join with a Great White to shatter the pyramids and restore natural order. Oceans rise, foliage grows over metal, and we see an explosion of life from the water. Here the game brings back the unifying mechanic of grabbing onto other animals as we grasp onto the Great White and smash our way through the antagonists. This makes sure that the toppling of the pyramids is a mutual victory between ourselves and the ocean rather than something we or the ocean do alone. Note also the use of the removing of chains in the finale as a way to symbolise us lifting the restrictive forces over the ocean.

While ABZÛ uses implicit storytelling, implicit doesn't always mean ambiguous, and there's consensus on the broad meaning of ABZÛ: The game has an ecological message, and the pyramids represent the effects of human industrial action on Earth's oceans. Moving to a more personal interpretation, ABZÛ works in three stages: It shows us the beauty of the ocean and makes us feel unity with its life, it shows the sorrow of that life disappearing, and then shows us how magical it would be if we removed that polluting influence and let the oceans flourish again. The sections in the shrines where the diver lifts a light out of her body and animals rocket upwards from the cosmos are symbolic of the unique power that people have to give life back to the sea.

It's easy for ecological messages in media to be a reductionist "people are inherently harmful to nature" or "technology is inherently harmful to nature" but one of the amazing things ABZÛ does is disagree strongly with both of these views while still promoting environmentalist lines of thought. It also does all of this without the use of any text or dialogue. Through the buildings we find, ABZÛ says that human influence and construction can co-exist peacefully with ocean life, and with a robotic protagonist and their mechanical helpers, it says that technology can be a transformatively positive thing for the sea. Embracing environmentalism in ABZÛ doesn't mean rejecting people or abandoning technology, ABZÛ promotes an ecological view that is instead reliant on respect for oceanic life, understanding of what we have in common with that life, and recognition of that life's beauty. Like us, ABZÛ's robot diver is very different from the life around them in some ways but very like it in others and entirely capable of working with it to build a better Earth.

So how do we view ABZÛ relative to other entertainment experiences based around the ocean? ABZÛ has a flooring visual quality and a cast of real species in the same way that a documentary like Planet Earth or an aquarium does, but it isn't nearly as educational as either of these things. Because of this, we might be tempted to view ABZÛ as less culturally valuable, but ABZÛ achieves unique goals through its visual, auditory, and mechanical facets. The game is almost entirely about emotionally investing us in its ocean and that gives us personal motivation to clean up the real oceans. ABZÛ might not teach us as much about marine biology, but what it does is remind us that for so many people before us the sea was sacred, and the gentle and tumultuous beauties of ABZÛ's depths can encourage us to treat it as sacred again. ABZÛ does one of the greatest things art and media can do: It takes us to another world to help us appreciate and understand how we might better act towards our own world. Thanks for reading.

Citations

1. A History of God (2011) by Karen Armstrong, p. 14
2. Religion in Human Evolution (2011) by Robert N. Bellah, p. 220
3. Encyclopedia of Imaginary and Mythical Places (2014) by Theresa Bane, p. 11
4. Enuma Elish: The Epic of Creation (2007) translated by L.W. King, p. 1

I like the idea that the ecological message isn't damning. That's refreshing in a world that deals more and more with absolutes of evil and good. This has been on my to-play list for a while now and looks like it would appeal to me more than Flower or Journey did, neither of which really grabbed me. Gorgeous looking, too. I told you before your screenshots could work for some cool desktop pictures, and that still stands true.

The inclusion of religion is a fascinating touch, one I'd like to see and hear for myself. Kind of a neat touch.

@sparky_buzzsaw: I think that if we're talking about the world in general right now, some of the nuance in discussions is disappearing because we are being faced with evils bigger than we have had recently, but in video games, I think our view on morality has improved a lot over the past 10 years or so. We have a long way to go, but there aren't many games now playing about with "good" and "evil" meters and while there aren't many games like ABZU, games like this this one drill down into individual moral issues better than games have done in the past.

Visually, it's one of the most amazing things I've ever played. That sort of feels like an obvious comment about the game but it's just true. Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it.