The ocean is another world. Beneath the surface of the sea, all the sounds and the stress of society are muffled away to nothing. In Aquanaut's Holiday, the player takes the role of a renowned oceanographer has been pushed to the limit by the constant attention of the press, environmentalists, and the government. It's time to leave it all behind, on an open-ended mission to explore one of the last unmapped areas in the ocean and create a new coral reef there. The game is played entirely at the player's pace. The only real goals and time limits are those that the player sets. The main point of the experience is simply to explore the virtual undersea environments. The game provides several ways in which to interact with the wildlife, and information gained from the local sea creatures can provide clues toward how to design a better coral reef. There are shipwrecks and ruins to discover, dozens of species of fish and sea life to observe, and no reasons to hurry.
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thankfully this notion was completely wrong. found the 10 hours of playing this game just melted away. the subtle understated joy of finding a type of fish you really like is just as impactful as stumbling upon a sunken pirate ship or the remnants of an ancient civilisation. exploring this world that feels unbound by any rules or notions about what it should be or what the player should be doing - its a delight that have only felt before in games like yume nikki.
feel so glad to have experienced this piece.
Nothing happens in Aquanaut's Holiday.
It's an open sea for you to float around and admire at your own leisure. There is nothing much to do or find in this sea, yet it nevertheless invites the player to explore it. Despite its peculiar disinterest with form, it keeps a straight face and carries on like nothing.
This is a game in the broadest definitions of the term, but it's still a game. And for that, Aquanaut's Holiday is endlessly fascinating. With it's sober and stoic sincerity, we have no choice but to take Aquanaut's Holiday as an exercise in video game minimalism. It's as much a game as it is a statement about the medium. We must commend it for this unfaltering self-confidence, because it allows all games to be more than what we prescribe them to be.
Thanks to Aquanaut's Holiday, we can learn to create our own entertainment, and through that find our own joy. We can slowly begin to approach all games with a more open mindset. We can disregard the constant strive for goals and forget about conventional narratives. We can understand games as a space, as their form. We can mature a little bit.
Through being an impressively expansive nothing, Aquanaut's Holiday confronts the game medium and asks if maybe somewhere along the way they collectively fell down a needlessly narrow path. Aquanaut's Holiday shows that they haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with interactive entertainment. In time, people slowly started listening. With each year, Aquanaut's Holiday is proven more and more right. Its simple message resounds with loud raw urgency to this day.
You don't have to be anything, you can just be nothing at all.
Somehow there's still fun to be had in that.
has some sinister atmosphere while also being relaxing, sort of thing u play randomly at 12 am and play throughh the night, honestly loved this alot and can see myself coming back to this with my friends to try to uncover more of the massive map. theres some stuff talked in the manual that i really wanted to find but theres always next time.
Made me feel something, for a while there. I play a lot of video games, but that's still a pretty short list.