English
Gamereactor
news
Abzû

Abzû is trying to get at "what scuba diving wishes it could be"

We chat with creative director Matt Nava about the beautiful underwater adventure.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

We caught up with creative director Matt Nava (art director at ThatGameCompany on Flower and Journey) from Giant Squid to discuss the very promising underwater exploration adventure Abzû. Nava, revealed that the game draws on his experiences with scuba diving, more specifically on his encounters with playful sea lions.

"There's a kind of elegance to the movement of sea life that we wanted to capture in the game as well," says Nava. "And we wanted to allow the player to have that ability with their own character. One of the things about Abzû is that it's not a simulation of scuba diving, it's more trying to get at the essence of what scuba diving wishes it could be. You have no air gates so you don't have to worry about having to come back out of the water and we let you swim incredibly fluidly. Which are two things that are really hard to do in scuba diving."

HQ

Abzû is part of a larger trend of games that take a rather leisurely approach to exploration - the pacing is entirely left to the player.

"There is a lot of games that have an open world sandbox and they're also have this narrative and thet kind of are at odds with eachother," says Nava. "The open world is saying 'Hey, let's play around, it's fun!' and the narrative is saying 'Move on! Move on! Move on!'. And so what we wanted to do was to avoid that conflict so that the world and the narrative move at your own pace."

Abzû is slated for release next year on PC and PlayStation 4.

Abzû

Related texts

0
AbzûScore

Abzû

REVIEW. Written by Bengt Lemne

"It's a beautiful adventure from start to finish."



Loading next content