be-a-water-nymph-and-befriend-ducks-in-chillout-game-naiad

There’s a sure sort of indie game that is all about chill. You discover a slice of the pure world at your personal tempo, with slightly puzzle-solving thrown in, however not often something prone to disrupt your meditative circulation. The archetype is Flower, during which you are a mild breeze that blows by means of fields rustling crops like some sort of invisible petal wizard, however there are many others—video games like Proteus, Feather, or Koi.

Naiad, which was proven in the course of the Day of the Devs stream at this time, looks like an ideal instance of the shape. You play a water nymph right out of Greek fable who’s born on the source of a river and grows up as she travels alongside it. You swim, dive, and do a froggy underwater sprint as you assist fish and different animals previous obstacles like fallen logs, trash, and traps. Apparently you can make buddies with geese, butterflies, turtles, rabbits, and even snakes and crocodiles, in addition to a speaking cloud who acts as a guide.

Our water nymph protagonist collects vitality from leaves and flowers that fall within the river, and collects daylight to make her hair develop. She can sing to name animals, make crops alongside the financial institution regrow, uncover secrets and techniques together with the river’s “essences” in addition to hidden poems, and restore coloration to this vivid world where it grows darkish.

It’s not all placing flowers in your hair and splashing about with frogs, after all. Like in Flower, there is a spreading darkness each time people intrude in your world. Pipes pump air pollution into the water and highways encompass it with noisy, smoky site visitors. Restoring nature by making flowers develop again alongside the riverbank looks like a technique we’ll have of gently pushing again, however presumably there are others. I’m not anticipating the endgame to be full-on ecoterrorism, only a light rebuke of civilization’s intrusion on this world of green lily pads and blue water.

Naiad is the work of Spanish indie developer HiWarp. The completed game will probably be a journey by means of 16 areas, together with a spring, lake, and forest in addition to darkish caves, rapids, and swamp, ending as you circulation out into the ocean. It’s scheduled for launch this yr on Steam.