Pity the “relaxing” games which set out to blanket their players in a wholesome fog. These minimalist or slight experiences set their stall against the mainstream philosophy of video game design focused on action, rules, clear progression, and often violence. So it is with Naiad, a sometimes pleasant swim down a river in which you sing to make flowers grow and discover poems by interacting with birds, bees, butterflies and other fauna.
Yet here’s the cause of my pity. All those other games, with their decisive action, systemic consequence, and neck-snapping: I was playing those to relax, too. Why else would I have snapped all those necks? Being shorn of base pleasures does not make Naiad a restorative oasis amid a desert of stressful video games, and it doesn’t make it more relaxing than its peers. In fact, it makes for an experience that left me restless, even a little anxious, when it made me feel anything at all.
Naiad is a water spirit of sorts, newborn and introduced to the world by a small talking cloud, who explains the few available verbs, most of which relate to swimming. You can push X to propel yourself with your legs like a frog (the better to lure frogs to follow you), and press A to swim underwater like a fish and bypass floating obstacles such as logs. The odd one out is singing, in which you hold B to belt out a note with a pitch you can alter with the analogue stick, Wandersong-style.
You use these abilities to experiment with the environment. Lead frogs one after another to a congregation of lilypads and your reward is a path of bubbles pointing to a secret tunnel. The tunnel will lead to an area which will further reward you with a sunbeam in which Naiad can grow slightly, an animal power of slight utility, or a short, dull poem. Reunite a scattering of lost ducklings with their seemingly negligent duck parent and you’ll be rewarded with a message at the top of the screen saying thanks.
These discoveries are de facto collectibles, and fill out Naiad’s pause menus in a manner that whiffs faintly of an accomplishment, but this is “experiment with the environment” in the gentlest possible terms. You will learn quickly that nearly every area you enter as you flow downstream has the same frogs to lure and the same scattered ducklings. When new flora and fauna are introduced, the process does not change. Sing – the notes don’t matter – to lure some butterflies towards some gleaming branches, and be rewarded with another poem or an essence or a thank you. Those birds in the branches? Sing to deposit enough of them on a different, glowing branch, and an egg will hatch. (The baby bird will attract a new bird of some kind, such as a hawk, which you can follow for a while to attain… a Steam achievement.)
The interactions between Naiad’s various elements are so shallow and repeated so often that any feeling of play is obliterated. Part of the problem is that your actions are divorced from their consequences. Sometimes hitting a series of flowers within a time limit will cause a rock to break, clearing a path; other times it will cause a human to emerge from a house and flip a switch, opening a gate. Neither makes any literal sense, but it’s also inconsistent in a way that means you can’t reverse engineer solutions. The next time you encounter a closed gate, for example, you’ll need to break a motorboat’s engine to open it.
It’s arbitrary in a way that’s entirely resistant to puzzle solving, and it turns progressing past every obstacle into busywork. Instead of thinking through a problem and coming to a solution, you simply do the only thing available to you in any given situation. If it’s possible to do many things, you do them all, and if you can’t see anything you can do, you do what I did: play the game like a robot vacuum cleaner, going over every patch twice and bumping into every corner.
Do I need to hit those flowers in order to progress? No idea. Do I need to hit them at all? Also no idea, because unlike a playground like Untitled Goose Game, Naiad gives you no checklist to steer your focus. Instead its menus only indicate that there are unknown things still to discover, thus producing an anxious fear in me that I might be missing something. This is not very relaxing at all.
Even steered by this anxiety, I still missed a few things, as indicated by their unrevealed spaces in the menus. I already know I’m not going to go back to find whatever those things are, because they probably just require me to herd more frogs. Those fucking frogs, who insist on hopping onto every surface other than the lilypad I’m trying to steer them towards. Naiad seems like it wants you to flow through it at as gentle or rapid a pace as you choose, but no flow state is possible when I’m clumsily nudging physics objects around or herding metaphorical cats. Naiad made me long for the concrete over the ambiguous: give me the hard logic of a nonogram puzzle and I’ll slip into a flow state in seconds, like I’d slip into a warm bath.
By now you’ve seen enough screenshots on this page to know that Naiad is gorgeous, at least. It might be at its best when you let go of the controller entirely and, after a minute or so, the camera leaves your protagonist to show glimpses of the environment. Each frame is a painting in motion, of light-dappled water and bushes that seem to breathe with the wind.
We’re in Gris territory here though, of a beauty that is “terribly, painfully obvious,” as Alice wrote about that game. Naiad might be beautiful, but it’s the stale, banal beauty of a landscape painting hung in the bathroom of a business hotel. It’s the kind of beauty that’s anathema to feeling, and not helped by a story and emotional beats that are ploddingly predictable.
As I played, I thought a lot about Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, a nonfiction narrative book that has no plot at all, but fills its pages with reams and reams of description of nature.
“At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. 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. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. 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.”
I’m not so annoyed at Naiad’s frogs that I want to see them consumed as if a milkshake by a passing giant water bug, but Dillard’s poetic depiction of nature leaves space within it for nature’s cruelty, and finds a way to talk about feelings and themes hard to access otherwise. It’s more revitalising for it. (The rhythm of “ruck, and rumple, and fall” can revive me for days all on its own.) 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. Those big meanies! They’re making trees sad by cutting them down and stopping a bear from sleeping by noisily mining for gems in a cave, and you, as Naiad, can stop them from doing so by singing to lure distracting animals towards them, as per usual. They’re also polluting the world via their cars and their towns, and there’s nothing you can do about that at all. This smug, storybook moralising briefly had me wonder whether I had Naiad all wrong; maybe this is, after all, a game for children. 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. Tove Jansson’s Moomin books and the children who love them understand perfectly that winter will come, the squirrel with the marvelous tail will die, and Little My will want to turn its tail into clothing.
I fear that Naiad is going to be received at least broadly positively by most reviewers (“Sumptuous.” – 3 stars) and many players, and I want to stress that I am not trying to be contrarian, as much as I might like to pretend I am simply too bold, too brave to fall for its wholesome charms. (The Lester Bangs of cosy games, the Pauline Kael of vibes, I am here to chew gum and kick non-violent games’ ass and I’m all out of gum.)
No, I’m here because I loved Abzu, a similarly gorgeous game about exploring a lush underwater world. I completed each of Abzu’s Journey-like puzzle environments and then lingered just to tinker with the flora and toy with the fauna, or just to enjoy the pure beauty of it. I also, for that matter, loved Journey and A Short Hike and a dozen other lightly playful relax ’em ups. I am broadly onboard with games which strip back the verbs available to the player in service of a more contemplative experience. If Naiad were a simple, joyful game about wild swimming, I’d be thrilled.
To come back to what I said at the beginning, part of Naiad’s problem is that, if you’re going to make “relaxing” the most explicit part of your game, then it has to be more relaxing than other kinds of games. Otherwise what’s left? In Naiad’s case, the answer is both too much and not enough.
It feels mean to kick out so hard at Naiad in a world already lousy with games that are more explicit, in all meanings of the word, and comparatively barren of games about swimming and duckling rescue. Yet its contrast against other games isn’t enough.
Naiad is, yes, sometimes pleasant. It’s an easy listening, acoustic cover of a song, and some will praise it for having the notes in the right order. Maybe they find that kind of muzak relaxing; for me, it just makes me feel like I’m on hold.