The swimming in recent indie game Naiad absolutely rules, which is good because you do a lot of it. You play as a water nymph who drifts around doing little nature tasks in the fringes of the human world, exploring the interplay between the environment and the creatures in it. It’s not quite as chill a game as that setup would suggest, but the visuals and swimming mostly make up for it.
I really cannot say enough good things about the swimming. Made by a solo developer, the basic task of Naiad is to guide your character through rivers, lakes, streams, pipes, and other bodies of beautifully-rendered water to move through its levels. You can dive and rush short distances, or sing to attract schools of fish to follow you on your journey. Basking in pools of sunlight makes your character “grow up,” getting bigger and gaining new abilities to help on her journey. The movement feels exactly as floaty and pleasantly imprecise as being a water-based creature would, and it feels wonderful to find your own path along a river that follows its own path through the landscape. The game shows the world from a top-down perspective, and each area is full of gorgeous vegetation and rocks and light. It’s a lovely game to look at and be in, as you can tell from its trailer:
Story-wise, there’s a twee cloud who guides you, and also a swirling black mass that threatens you. There’s also a lot of humans, who do all sorts of bad human things: chop down trees, pollute, crash their cars, argue. Sometimes you stop the humans by scaring them off or interfering with their tasks, but other times you help them by assisting them in building bridges or finding their boat oars. Naiad mostly seems to want to tell a very basic, heavy-handed story of “people bad,” so this fuzzy relationship between your naiad and the humans can feel a little unclear at times.
I had way more fun with tasks that ignored humans altogether. Most levels have baby ducks you can reunite with their mother, and I spent entirely too long herding distractable ducks around. There are also some frogs you can compel to lily pads, but I would recommend avoiding this unless you want to be driven mad; the frogs want to go everywhere but where you so obviously want them to go, and while I appreciated their rebelliousness, it wasn’t always the fun kind of annoying to try to steer them.
In between all of this is some puzzle solving, which is where Naiad starts to go a little bit off the rails. The game starts with basic navigation puzzles, simple enough to fit its chill vibe, but they soon become inconsistent and a bit illogical. Why does zipping through these flowers–sometimes in order, sometimes backwards–sometimes break rocks? Why does breaking this human’s vehicle cause a gate to open, when other gates are opened by compelling humans to open them? It’s not always clear why an action leads to a particular consequence, nor where the solution to a puzzle can be found, which means I did a lot of swimming around the edges of levels looking for secret passages, or singing at various objects or creatures to see if anything would happen. This could be particularly frustrating in levels that were large bodies of water instead of narrow streams, where the top-down perspective made it difficult to know where I was supposed to go or if I’d been to an area already. A game where you just move from the top of the screen to the bottom might be too simple, but it feels so good to just do that that other activities sometimes felt clumsy in comparison.
But the thing that frustrated me the most about Naiad was how long it spent telling me its story was about to end and then not ending. The ominous black swirl starts off sowing doubt in you, in comparison to the cloud’s gentle encouragement, and as the game goes on it keeps warning you that the end is near. But then the game would continue, and the gameplay felt mostly the same, until I felt a mismatch between what the narrative was telling me and what was actually happening. I started feeling impatient for the game to be over–not always because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because it kept hyping up an end that kept not coming. The actual end game is drawn out so long that it almost felt comical; I kept popping into Aftermath’s Slack to express my frustration, but I thought I was so close to the end that I didn’t want to just quit out.
Some of this is in service of the larger narrative Naiad wants to tell about the cycle of life; when the credits told me it was made in memory of the creator’s grandparents I felt like a monster for yelling “Why aren’t you over?!” at it so frequently. When I’m playing a game for work, I always try to stay aware that my circumstances are different than the average person’s; something might feel too long to me because I’ve been playing a game more than I otherwise would, or because I’m on a deadline. In Naiad’s case, where there was no deadline or requirement, my play session stretched out because the game kept telling me I was close to finishing it and I wanted to see what would happen. It’s not a long game, but it feels like it could have been much shorter.
Despite how negative this all sounds, the look and feel of Naiad is so good that it mostly trumps the rest of my frustrations. It is a simply beautiful game that feels great to navigate, and the first half is wonderfully chill and peaceful. If you take more breaks than I did, its pacing problems might not frustrate you as much. It might be best as a game to play a handful of levels or a chapter in a go, taking time to revel in all the lovely things about it and swimming around with the fish. (Not the frogs, though. Screw the frogs.)
