Yet here’s the cause of my pity.
Why else would I have snapped all those necks?
You use these abilities to experiment with the environment.
When new flora and fauna are introduced, the process does not change.
Those birds in the branches?
Sing to deposit enough of them on a different, glowing branch, and an egg will hatch.
Part of the problem is that your actions are divorced from their consequences.
Do I need to hit those flowers to progress?
Do Ineedto hit them at all?
This is not very relaxing at all.
By now you’ve seen enough screenshots on this page to know that Naiad is gorgeous, at least.
He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes," Dillard writes.
“And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.
The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed.
His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent.
He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football.
I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall.
I gaped bewildered, appalled.
An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away.
The frog skin bag started to sink.”
It’s more revitalising for it.
Naiad’s poetry, literal and otherwise, leaves space for nothing.
These waters do not run deep.
Where Naiad strays closest to saying much of anything about anything is when humans appear.
Yet I know of no child who wouldn’t still find such cloying sentimentalism dull.
Again I thought of all the existing works which explore themes of nature and use it to tell parables.
No, I’m here because I lovedAbzu, a similarly gorgeous game about exploring a lush underwater world.
If Naiad were a simple, joyful game about wild swimming, I’d be thrilled.
Otherwise what’s left?
In Naiad’s case, the answer is both too much and not enough.
Yet its contrast against other games isn’t enough.
Naiad is, yes, sometimes pleasant.
