Naiad offers real joy and real frustration – but always with the goal in mind.
There was a moment when I was swimming that I just couldn't get over. I'm going to start the front crawl. With your feet on the edge of the pool, arms forward, facing in, kick out, then…
…and then I was suddenly completely alone in a world of the purest blue. That blue! The matte blue of the pool floor came to me through several feet of water. With my head down, I could feel the water rising in an arc over my scalp 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 feeling is absolutely true for Naiad, a new game about swimming in the wild. There was no polite pool wall kicking, Naiad himself did a lot of backstroke and a lot of dolphin kicks, not a lot of frontstroke, but that feeling of being in the water, being in the water with purpose, a sense of belonging, that feeling of your skin and The feeling that water and skin are working together to push you forward? Naiad absolutely nailed it.
Naiad is an engaging game, but it's so exciting, such a watery delight at first, that it took me a while to notice it. For the first few levels, it sets a simple framework. Looking from above, you can move around a series of lakes and small rivers, encounter wildlife, and interact with your surroundings in a variety of toy-like ways. You can sing to attract animals, so you'll collect ducklings and return them to their parents. You can gather the frogs behind you and place them on the lily pads. You can sing to make flowers grow, or to make bees return to the hive. You are like a fairy, a spirit of the river itself, and in Naiad, especially in the beginning, the river is something that brings everything home.
It's beautiful stuff, perhaps my favorite video game water since Mario Sunshine. You can see the surface sparkle, see the ripples where it meets the shoreline, and you can see the way branches and flowers fall on it and sway around. But you do feel its invisible power. You feel the water flow as you negotiate it as you use the simple controls: one stick for steering, another for sprinting, and another to take you beneath the surface through certain obstacles.
The textures here are very pleasing. Wildlife on the surface often looks like it's made of paper: paper bushes, papyrus, paper birds, and you've helped them find their habitat in the paper trees. More complex animals are made up of different parts, so the bear feels like a negotiation between his arms, legs and nose. What about the water itself? Everywhere, a pearly sheen is shown in some parts where one needs to know a particular current, hinted at in traces of bubbles elsewhere. At the end of each level, the entire screen will dissolve into particles like wet sand before falling apart. Naiad is an immersive game.
It's interesting to talk about sand because at about two hours in, if you asked me what Naiad is, I would say it's a very mild sandbox. In the early levels you'll get from A to B and through different idyllic landscapes, but overall you can do whatever you want. Put the frog on the lily? There is an advantage to this. So are those lost ducklings who need to be reunited. You can call these puzzles, but they are not mandatory. They unlock cute things in the menu, and the whole game is a bit like creating a poem with the text snippets you win. But you can also skip it and play around as you like.
However, this changed and it took me a while to discover that it was doing this. The human world slowly encroaches, bringing with it bespoke puzzles that must be solved, often opening the way forward and taking you into the next section. Two things here: Naiad is an awkward puzzle game at times. Figuring out what you need to do in certain parts can be difficult, and the fantastic counter-logic that powered part one – and of course I needed to link an action together via three purple flowers – in part two A bit of a grind when you need to clearly understand cause and effect. So that's it.
But there are a few other things that make up for that a little bit. The second half of Naiad isn't as interesting as the first half, and that's kind of the point. It's a bit like swimming in the wild in real life isn't that fun anymore because we've filled our rivers and oceans with sewage. I would say that Naiad has kind of polluted itself – the environment is getting tougher, there's less freedom, there's less curiosity – because it knows that you can't act responsibly without acknowledging all the problems Make a game that shows how exciting wild swimming can be in 2024. The way humans make it less exciting.
In other words, Naiad makes a brilliant point and does it very effectively. Deep in the later levels, I longed for the early days of the game, where the water was blue and there were little ducks that needed me to show them their way home. Even in its later stages, the Naiad's movements are still fun and glorious – there's trash in the water, but the currents still work their magic. But I think I appreciate more that it's willing to get me down a little bit just to remind me that there are real things at stake, and that the world of swimming, outside of my local pool and weekly lessons, is so dominated by all this stuff Troubled.
Developer HiWarp provided a copy of Naiad for review.
