AQUARIA IS OUT!

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: December 8th, 2007


The Final Teaser.

Aquaria has finally been released! I’ll have (much) more to say about the game later, but as the Bit Blot site is down, I’ll just provide you with some hot, hot links for now.

The links that really matter:
Buy the game here. (Do it.)
Download the demo here. (63 MB)

Enjoy.

  • Moose

    I don’t honestly see where the “jealousy” argument is coming from – you’re jealous of someone because they spent two years working on a single project? Ok, I can see being jealous of Derek’s artistic ability, but there isn’t a lot of point being jealous of that since not much can be done about it until someone invents the DNA resequencer from Red Dwarf..

    After playing for a bit longer tonight I’m still enjoying it but I’m starting to feel a bit mixed up. I can’t tell whether the game wants to be a Knytt-style explorer or a shoot’em’up. It’s hard to relax and explore when half the ocean appears to be trying to murder you. :)

  • TheShawn

    Ya know, I was all excited because I bought it and installed it and sat down to play it and I can’t even enjoy it for more than 5 min. at a time because my pc is plagued by stop errors and I can’t figure out if its because of my mobo my psu or my video card. Its just my luck. However, I’m loving what I’m experiencing in those 5 minutes.

  • wormguy

    Absolutely beautiful. I’ve been playing the demo and I’ll have to buy this.

  • Praadur

    TwistedRabbit: The resolution is the first two values of the init.cfg file, you can open that in a text editor (of any kind) and change them. I changed them to ‘1440 900’ and it worked like a charm.

    Moose: Having played a long while myself, and as I’m a huge Knytt Stories fan, I can definitely see where you’re coming from. In fairness though, the more difficult levels of Knytt were exactly like this, littered with nearly impossible to avoid enemies and spikes.

    The only difference being that our tiny Junii couldn’t fight back, whereas Naija can. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing though… I’ll leave to the opinion of the reader.

  • Moose

    Praadur, I agree, but it feels weird when the whole map is as vicious as the cool dark shadowy bit at the end of The Machine. I mean, poor Naija can get mugged by an octopus just outside her own house!

    And I have a distinct feeling that the cut scenes about the energy race who only wanted to destroy, are a hint that just blowing up too much marine life will result in a bad/amoral ending..

  • captain_duck

    I’ve had one crash so far in my first 5 hours of play. It was in the cathedral. Annoying since there aren’t that much save crystals, but meh i’ll live.

  • Gene G.

    @ ulix: I suppose the replay value is there. I beat the demo and I’m interested as to where the game goes from there.

    Maybe the problem is the fact that I just got off from beating La-Mulana. I want a game to be a lot more fast-paced. But, Aquaria has a smoother difficulty curve. It starts off slow, but it gets much better. I might buy it.

    I understand how much effort went into the game, and I will GLADLY support the game developers. I just wish 30 bucks was the price for a boxed version, with some kind of special features. A downloadable version could have been $20 or so. But, my complaints are strictly personal.

  • Twisted Rabbit

    thanks Praadur! now i need to find 30$ somewhere. maybe if i collect enough pennies….

  • Twisted Rabbit

    actually, i feel like it distorts the image … The config screen says that it only supports 4:3 right now, so i assume they will eventually get that wide screen ratio going. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

  • http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

    @Anthony: Oh no, you misunderstand! I don’t think that — I was only talking about a select few people who are _definitely_ throwing some harsh vibes, is all. :)

    And that’s a keen observation regarding the theme… I wonder how many people will notice this.

    It’s nice to see you ’round here, by the way! I always appreciate your nuggets of wisdom. :D

  • Xander

    It’s 5 degrees celsius outside, and I’ve been stood for an hour in the wind waiting for my damn bus to arrive to take me to university. I’ve also given up, come back home, put on the kettle and loaded up aquaria.

    Aquaria; the plus side to shitty mornings!

  • Del_Duio

    Maybe they can write that on the back of the box as a tagline Xander.

    Oh yeah, that’s right XD

  • Moose

    Has anyone any ideas about the options for Nodes? I notice that the file data.000 is a zlib file but it seems that it has been beheaded of its index to prevent it being opened with WinZip, meaning that it isn’t possible to just look at the built-in lua libraries to find the names of function and node calls. The template has some but they aren’t necessarily representative. Or are BB planning to release these later?

  • Ritgun

    I bought this game rigth after I finished Demo. This game is totally sweet-!!!

  • Jolty

    Demo’s great, Only thing thats keeping me from plunking down my 30$ it is some kind of pin comment system (where you can pin a comment on places) I’m not into mindless exploring and I already seen some points that could be marked.. Ya seems trival, but ya.. mew

  • Jolty

    (mindless re-exploring I mean .. my bad ^^)

  • l4rgo

    does it work on a mac? or will a mac (demo)version be available?

    my mother would probably love this game but she uses a macbook.

  • RandomTagGen

    Anyone else think this would be FRIGGEN AWESOME on the Wii?

  • PHeMoX

    Not sure if the Wii’s controls would provide an easy way of controlling, but yeah, I’d definitely think it would be awesome to see this title on other platforms. Xbox live, Playstation 3, Wii … why not? I guess it’s up to the developers though and I have no idea how feasible any of those platform conversions would be.

  • l4rgo

    oh and thanks for win98 compatibility ^^

  • Joris

    From playing the demo:

    + Graphics, beatifully drawn
    + Polished, very professional presentation for an indie game
    + Atmosphere, interesting narrative, coherent whole
    + Controls and core mechanics with the whole singing and stuff
    ++ Indie game with soul
    ++ Music

    – Ugly unnatural voice, clashes with the nice pictures and atmosphere
    — Extremely boring level design, I just dont have the patience for this kind of stuff… This really kills an otherwise very impressive effort

  • Joris

    thats not supposed to come out like that… the first o’s are +’s and the last one is a -…

  • Moose

    Yes, I’m starting to lose this now…

    Cathedral boss. I read that I had to feed him poison. Makes sense. However, I can only feed him poison when he’s in one specific one out of three eating animations – no apparent reason why. Oh, and if I don’t feel like playing through that boss encounter again tonight.. then, well, that’s just tough because that’s where I am in the game. Whatever happened to that fun Aquaria game I used to have?

    Bitterly disappointed to find out that there are only 3 song “spells” and the rest are alternate forms, which are just outright better invoked via the number keys on the keyboard.

    It’s still not a bad game, but it’s nowhere near as good as it could have been. It could really use an XP system, so that all the exploratory killing has a reward instead of just being a nuisance..

  • lance

    Amazing game. And yes its for the mac. Bit-blot is in a deal with Ambrosia to bring the game over in the January/Febuary timeline :D

    Man is it a massive game! Im doing a lot of exploring now, and i clocked in 21 hours ^_^;

  • Space Ranger

    I love it, but one thing that does annoy me:

    The spiritual “Something in my soul is telling me to find out where I come from, and find out why I exist blah blah blah” cliché nonsense…reaaaally bugs me, unless it’s used in Final Fantasy. Then it’s allowed.