{"id":2886,"date":"2021-12-10T15:00:13","date_gmt":"2021-12-10T22:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=2886"},"modified":"2021-11-02T19:49:28","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T01:49:28","slug":"video-game-abzu-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2021\/12\/10\/video-game-abzu-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"VIDEO GAME: Abzu (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Abzu\"Abz\u00fb<\/b>
\n<\/u><\/strong>Year: 2016
\nRating: E
\nTime Played: ~2 hours<\/p>\n

After years of obtaining the free game from the Epic Games store, I’m finally working my way through many of them. I’m not doing them in any particular order, but I saw Abz\u00fb<\/em> and thought it looked relaxing. Once I got into it, I found that it was basically an underwater version of Journey<\/em><\/a>. While I loved the narrative nature of Journey<\/em>, I felt Abz\u00fb<\/em> had less of an emotional impact by the time its short playthrough concluded.<\/p>\n

While Abz\u00fb<\/em> is incredibly derivative of Journey<\/em>, I do have to admit that the visuals were quite stunning. Everything was rich and colorful\u2014even in some of the darker levels. There was a lot of care given to the underwater environments and it was clear that the game developers had done their research to recreate these beautiful underwater environments. Unfortunately, the underwater gameplay is also something I struggled with in this game. I constantly found myself struggling with the controls and having my character not go where I intended. Of course, games that don’t have normal gravity physics seem to all have this problem, including Flower<\/em> (which was also from Journey<\/em>‘s developer).<\/p>\n

One of my qualms with Journey<\/em> is that it was too short, which also applies to Abz\u00fb<\/em>. I’m all for artistic video games, but I’d like a little more substance than what I get in titles like these. Then again, if you absolutely loved Journey<\/em>, then Abz\u00fb<\/em> is a must-play because of all of its similarities. You can easily play through both in an evening and can relax in these non-confrontational environments. Sure, there’s still some danger involved for the player character, but there’s no way to violently react to this danger. In the end, enjoy Abz\u00fb<\/em> for its ambiance, even if it’s a short Journey<\/em> (har har).<\/p>\n

An underwater Journey<\/em> clone, I give Abz\u00fb<\/em> 3.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n

\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" \"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" \"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abz\u00fb Year: 2016 Rating: E Time Played: ~2 hours After years of obtaining the free game from the Epic Games store, I’m finally working my way through many of them. I’m not doing them in any particular order, but I saw Abz\u00fb and thought it looked relaxing. Once I got into it, I found that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,1900],"tags":[9,2907,2222,2909,2219,2216,8,2908,906,380],"class_list":["post-2886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3-0-stars","category-video-game","tag-9","tag-abzu","tag-artistic","tag-austin-wintory","tag-flower","tag-journey","tag-review","tag-underwater","tag-video-game","tag-visuals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2886"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2890,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions\/2890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}