Sorry for the late post, I haven’t had access to my PC due to a PSU issue. Just fixed it btw. I’ve been playing Forza Horizon 6, and now that I think about it, it does feel like it has some of the walking simulator genre in it, except, well. Every series is a location in a country, you can always win in exploration mode, there are no concrete goals, all that.
But for this one I’m going with ABZU, which has always been my wind-down game before I sleep. You play a diver dropped into the middle of the ocean. There’s no HUD, no combat, no way to die, and not a single word of dialogue. You just swim. And that’s the whole point I want to make: in ABZU the swimming is the storytelling. The design does the work, not the plot.
Start with movement itself. The controls make you glide, coast, and build momentum before slowing down again. That rhythm forces a meditative pace on you, and it sets the emotional register before anything “happens.” A game about bringing a dead ocean back to life could never be told at a run-and-gun speed. The way you move already tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
Then there’s what the design takes away. No fail state, no health bar, no retry screen. Stripping out those standard verbs (shoot, die, restart) repositions you completely. You’re not a soldier clearing a level, you’re a witness and a caretaker. That’s a design decision that decides what story can even be told here.
Here’s the part I want to correct from my notes, because I was half wrong. I described it as an almost infinite, goal-free open map. It actually feels that way, but it’s a linear descent broken into chapters, and each region has one real way onward. What tricked me is that there’s no quest marker. Instead the level design narrates: schools of fish drift toward the next current, beams of light point down into the dark, and big ancient structures pull your eye toward the tunnel out. So the environment itself is the narrator. When you finally find the exit you don’t read it off a map, the world showed you. That tension (feels like free wandering, is actually guided) is the trick. You think you’re exploring, but the design is walking you through the story beat by beat.
The best example is the restoration mechanic. You activate pools and portals that free trapped fish and flood dead, gray zones back with color and life. Progressing forward and healing the ocean are literally the same action. So the theme, bringing life back, is never told to you. You do it with your hands. And each new region rewards it with new fish, new music, and a new palette, so moving deeper always feels like the ocean waking back up.
The meditation statues are my favorite bit, and they’re kind of like bonfires in Dark Souls. You sit on these shark-shaped statues and the camera drifts off into the fish around you. It’s a forced pause that makes you actually look at the ecosystem you’ve been restoring, and they double as fast travel points once you unlock them. Design-wise, that’s the game building reflection straight into the loop instead of just letting you skip around.
Company matters too. Small fish start schooling behind you, you can grab onto bigger creatures and ride them, and a scarred great white shark slowly becomes your guide. Your arc from intruder to belonging is delivered entirely through who you’re swimming with, not through a cutscene. The shark, usually the monster in every ocean movie ever, becomes your partner. That whole reframing happens through movement and proximity alone.
Even the music is keyed to motion. Cross into a new region and the score swells. So swimming forward is also cueing the emotional beat. You’re kind of conducting the soundtrack by moving through space.
And all of this points somewhere. The machines draining the ocean are cold and triangular, and everything you do undoes them. The game hands you an argument about environmental responsibility without ever lecturing, because caring for the ocean is just the thing your hands are doing the entire time.
