Naiad review – wild sailing with a winning hint of urgency

There is a moment while swimming that I cannot get over. I’m going to start crawling forward. Feet rest against the side of the pool, arms pointing forward, facing inward, feet first, and then…

…And suddenly I am completely alone in a world of pure blue. This one is blue! The dull blue of the pool bottom reaching me through several feet of water. With my head down, I feel the surface of the water rising over my head and shoulders. I need to exhale before I start thinking about arms or legs, but now I feel like I could stay in this place forever.

This is the feeling that the new wild swimming game “Naiad” simply amazes. There’s no polite pool wall to bang your feet against, and the Naiads themselves do a lot of backstroke and a lot of dolphin swimming rather than front crawl style, but it’s a feeling of being in the water, being in the water with a purpose, a sense of belonging, the feeling of your skin and the water’s skin working together to propel you forward? Naiad absolutely nails it.

Naiad is a fun game, but at first there was such excitement, such watery delight, that it took me a while to notice. For the first few levels, he sets up a simple structure. From a top-down perspective, you navigate a variety of lakes and streams, encounter wildlife, and interact with the objects around you in a variety of toy-like ways. You can sing to attract animals, so you collect ducklings a lot and return them to their parents. You can gather the frogs behind you and place them on the water lilies. You can sing to make flowers grow or bring bees back to their hives. You are a kind of nymph, the spirit of the river itself, and in Naiad, especially in the early parts, the river is something that takes things home.

This is a beautiful thing, with possibly my favorite video game water since Super Mario Sunshine. You see the sheen on the surface and the ripples where it meets the shoreline, and you see the branches and flowers settling on it and swaying. But you feel his invisible forces well. You experience the current as something that you manage using simple controls: one stick controls the rudder, another pushes you, and a third takes you underwater and over certain obstacles.

There’s such a pleasure in the textures here. Wildlife on the surface often looks like it’s made of paper: paper bushes, paper grass, paper birds you helped find roosts in paper trees. More complex animals are made up of different parts, so the bear has a sense of negotiation between its arms, legs and face. What about the water itself? Nowhere and everywhere, showing up as a pearly sheen in some areas where you need to know specific currents, and hinted at in traces of bubbles in other places. At the end of each level, the entire screen dissolves into particles similar to wet sand and then crumbles. Naiad is a game to immerse yourself in.

It’s funny talking about sand, because two hours later, if you asked me what Naiad was, I would say it was a very soft sandbox. The early levels take you from A to B, moving through various bucolic landscapes, but by and large you can do whatever you want. Put frogs on lilies? There’s a bonus for this. The same goes for lost ducklings that need to be reunited. You could call these things puzzles, but they are not required. They unlock interesting things in the menu, and the whole game is a bit like constructing a poem from earned text fragments. But you can also skip as much as you want and just splash around.

However, things are changing and it took me a while to notice that this was happening. The human world slowly encroaches, and with it, unique puzzles that must be solved, often in order to open a path forward and move on to the next section. There are two things here: Naiad is a clunky puzzle game at times. It can be difficult to understand what you need to do in some sections, while the fairy-tale anti-logic that fueled the first section (of course I need to piece together the movement through three purple flowers) wears off a bit in the second, when you need to clearly understand causality. investigative connection. That’s all.

But there’s something else that makes up for it a little. The second half of The Naiad isn’t as fun as the first, and that’s the point. It’s a bit like swimming in the wild isn’t as much fun in real life now that we’ve filled rivers and oceans with sewage. I’d like to say that Naiad pollutes herself a little – increasingly grim conditions, less freedom, much less sense of wonder – because she knows that you can’t responsibly make a game about how brilliant wild swimming is in 2024 without acknowledging all the ways by which men have made it less miraculous.

In other words, Naiad expresses brilliant thoughts and does so very effectively. Deep into the later levels, I really missed the early game, where the water was blue and there were ducklings who needed me to show them the way home. Even later, the Naiad is still interesting and enjoyable to move around – there is debris in the water, but those currents still work their magic. But I think I admire him more for being willing to upset me a little, just to remind me that there are real things at stake, and the swimming world, outside of my local pool and my weekly lessons, is caught up in all this stuff. too much.

A copy of Naiad was provided for review by developer HiWarp.