Aquamarine: Explorer's Edition Reviews

Beautiful art, but seemed very hard on normal. A little buggy and just not that fun.

Since the game has only just been released, there are still some issues that need to be addressed. However, despite the bugs, I've already fallen in love with the beauty and mystery of aquamarine's world. The art is fun and exciting. I can't wait to explore more of the world.

I backed the kickstarter and beta-tested it, as well as played it before on itch.io but wanted to support the devs for creating a new update after having a rough start. Yes the game was buggy upon release, but at the same time they were always really quick in their response to bug reports on their discord. It looks like the months of polish paid off because I haven't encountered bugs in the new edition yet! As for the game itself the mood is great, gameplay mostly delivers on the "chill roguelike" premise, and the puzzles are not too hard but engaging. I had fun exploring and making sense of the world of aquamarine. Controls quite well on the steam deck too!

The game is nice but there are still frequents bug (unresponsive control, freezes and so on). Also it's not clear when it autosave so it's an hassle to restart from a previous zone

The art is amazing and it's almost worth keeping just for that, but unfortunately the gameplay takes a distant backseat to the visuals. The mechanics and controls are very counter intuitive, making the experience frustrating. In my short time playing I've already had multiple experiences of wanting to perform a simple task and just clicking around everything on the screen trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do. It feels like it was designed for someone who already knows how to play, and the visuals are focused entirely on looking beautiful, meaning they lack any consideration for how they can be used to guide your actions and make the controls feel intuitive. As a small example, the game sets up a simple movement routine when you're in your pod. Possible locations are indicated as circles, you click one to highlight it in orange as your intended destination, and click again to confirm your movement. This works well and is very simple to learn. However, when you go to make a long distance movement, a map opens with possible movement areas, you click one to highlight it in orange as your intended destination, but when you click again to actually move.. nothing happens. There's no buttons saying "go" or "move" and I'm left clicking around the screen and pushing buttons trying to figure out how to actually go to the location I've selected. In the end, you have to click on the pilot's speech bubble to move. There's nothing in the game that suggests that this would be a button, speech bubbles aren't buttons in other parts of the game, the speech bubble doesn't get highlighted once you've chosen your location, it isn't flashing or pulsing etc. there's no symbol popping up that implies it's a clickable "go" button. This is a small example but these kinds of things happen frequently enough that playing the game just feels frustrating a lot of the time. One other issue that the devs might want to know about is that I also ended up with a bug where my control panel disappeared, and I couldn't get it to reappear even when I restarted everything and tried to start a new play through. I don't know how you could replicate it but I was still in the tutorial, I'd just reached the area where it said something like "I know you're probably sick of me but there's lots more I need to teach you about" and I exited the game, then when I reopened the game later, my control panel was gone and I couldn't get it back. Without this bug I may have tried to power through the difficulties to learn all of the idiosyncratic controls so that I could enjoy all of the amazing art in the rest of the game. For now, I can't recommend the game but I would really love to be able to play it and hopefully it's something I can come back to later when some of the current issues are ironed out.

Lovely art and music, but the game is completely unplayable. I don't understand how can you release a product in this state.

Pretty game, nice soundtrack, but the resource hunting is completely busted. I'm not sure if it's pure RNG, or if there's some sort of resource cycle, but I spent just shy of 2 hours trying to play this game. You have 2 main resources you need to survive - energy for your pod, and food for your player character. The first run, I was running low on food, and went hunting for some, and despite being proactive there just....wasn't any. My garden couldnt grow any in time. And so I died within 3 days. Annoyingly had to go through the tutorial again, and this time was a bit more careful with food, but eventually got stuck at a point where I was basically completely unable to get any energy, despite unlocking a number of different areas to look for it in. I broke my ship 4x running out of energy just trying to *find* any so that I could make my next mod. Ultimately I feel way too frustrated with this game, that its punishing despite my best attempts - I'm diasppointed cause I otiginally backed this on KS years ago, and was thinking I'd have a fun "relaxed paced" time when the game has been nothing but anxiety inducing due to frustrating resource mechanics.

Tutorial is brief, no way to review its content to understand the confusing way the pod systems work together. Seemingly finite amount of energy crystals and food. Running out dumps you back to start with refilled energy, but I am still stuck after getting the first item. The game description promises a relaxing survival game, but what I really got was an opaquely assembled turn-based isometric puzzler. I do not think this game is ready at its current state and have requested a refund. Added for context: energy crystals are consumed whenever you move the pod or use a pod module. You also need to move to gather energy crystals. You can easily run out of the resource you need to gather more of that resource that allows you to play the game. The store page and reviews may call this "strategic" or "thoughtful" but in practice it is an annoyance that detracts from the quiet and relaxing vibe this game is trying to create. Edited to respond to developer: Consider adding an indicator to tell the player when resources will respawn. In that 30 minutes of playtime I logged, I tried to find out when that would happen. Four times I used all the energy gained from pod regeneration to travel between the three map squares I had revealed to see if more crystals or food would respawn. Never saw it happen. I don't think a game's "Normal" difficulty should be able to put a first time player into the limbo state of uncertainty I experienced. Doing some quick math based on my profile, I've burned through 751.2 hours of time on 18 different games Steam has tagged as "Open World Survival" so I'm comfortable claiming I "get" the genre's mechanics and gameplay loops. Having grown up on the brutality of 90s PC games (X-COM UFO Defense and Terror From the Deep, TES: Daggerfall) I am extraordinarily forgiving than most when it comes to complex mechanics and difficulty. I highly doubt anyone whose experiences are more modern will have the patience for the game's current state.

This is one of those games where I'm drawn right in from the moment the menu loads and the music starts playing. As a huge fan of beautiful and chill story-driven exploration, I really enjoyed the Explorer's/Story Mode that was added in an update and lets you opt out of the survival aspects and attacks. EDIT: While waiting for my crash issue to be resolved, I started a new playthrough in Relaxed Mode and actually stuck with it to the end. I guess having to be conscious of your resources and surroundings was more interesting, but for me story mode might have been a bit more fun. I didn't try Normal Mode that most of the negative reviews seem to be about. The comic-style graphics are gorgeous, the music perfectly atmospheric, worldbuilding great, I've really been enjoying the whole atmosphere and just spending time looking at the art and the creature animations. Researching alien ocean life obviously reminded me of In Other Waters. That one has more elaborate ecosystems, but tbh I preferred this game because it has more visual beauty and gives you bigger freedom in exploration. In Explorer's Mode, I was just swimming in resources and could do what it said on the tin. Relaxed Mode I found mildly challenging, but it actually deserves its name even for someone as easily stressed as me. My pod got attacked quite a lot, but I never felt in serious danger of a game over as I always had resources to repair it right away. But yes, the crashes that a lot of people have mentioned. Apparently it crashes more for some people than for others and I am some people. I've had to ESC into the menu and reload the save lots of times, and in a few places I had to restart the whole game. Not a huge problem as the game autosaves so much that I've never noticed losing progress, and loading times were ok. EDIT: A more serious crash issue was apparently connected to my Linux system, solved through Discord and will get patched. I was able to continue, again without losing progress. The only other thing that really bothered me was the tedious inventory management. I get that it's more realistic than being able to carry around half a hardware store, a stack of 20 bowls of hot soup and whatnot in an invisible backpack, but it sure isn't more fun. I was promised by a dev that he'd consider adding more slots for Explorer Mode, which I think would make perfect sense. I saw another review mention achievements not working, but for me they worked and were very satisfying when they popped up unexpectedly. I didn't experience issues with using abilities, either. Content note, you decide if it's a pro or con: apparently to enhance the 70's feeling, some of the plants you find have psychedelic effects. Unlike some other games, I didn't feel like it was glorified or forced upon you. EDIT: I've now finished the game at a very leisurely pace and it left me impressed. The ending was a bit of a sudden info dump, but fascinating to find out that there was a lot more to the story than I'd thought. I liked it. It's a shame it's so unstable, but I'd still absolutely recommend this game's story mode for players like myself who are drawn to original settings, beautiful visuals and peaceful exploration, and the Relaxed setting for those who'd like a mild challenge. * * * If you like chill and story-driven games, check out my curator [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35872486]Peaceful Adventures and Stories[/url]. You're also welcome to join the [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/chilladventures]group[/url].

This game isn't ready for release, and doesn't provide even a shadow of what it promised. First, it's technically shaky. The game stopped responding multiple times, it's possible to click too fast and end up traveling to two places at once. Everything seems fine until you try to move again, and you end up panning to the second location, far out of range and covered by fog. Rather than locking out player input during an animation, the game simply misbehaves if too much input is recieved. This is compounded by a profoud lack of feedback. There's a delay between clicking and there being any reaction; combined with frequently missed clicks, this makes each input a guessing game. Long animations and waiting for the creatures to take their action without any real indication of if their movement is completed (unless you look at your move counter). This is a recipe for frustration. Moon logic puzzles abound, where you surface to get past some debris to get an upgrade, then encounter the same situation but are unable to surface. Slightly later, you have to use a module in a way that provides no feedback when you use it once, but needs to be very precisely done twice because you still can't surface, despite surfaced creatures being in the same area. Moreover, the ability to even use these modules is limited to three, and their recharge is both rare and unexplained. Since the situation resets when you leave a room but your power doesn't, this can create a soft-lock, with the answer being, "Whoops, restart the whole game and do better." Then there's the selling point that your actions have permanent consequences, a claim I now see doesn't exist on the Steam page. This is good, since the choices appear to be either kill the infinitely respawning creatures or they'll kill themselves. Resources as well seem to randomly appear or deplete. This is very much a linear item-collection story with extra steps. The artwork is beautiful, but that's really the only thing the game has going for it. It lacks the agency for a survival game, it lacks the depth for a strategy game, it lacks the rapid cycle time of a puzzle game, and it has too much piled on it to be an art game. It seems I am around halfway through the game, but I'm entirely uninterested in finishing. I spent my playtime wondering when things would pick up, and when I saw I was halfway through the second of three biomes, I knew that was never going to happen. A beautiful game with a poor gameplay loop is not a good game.