While the music is great, it’s fortunate that the combat can get your heart rate up even without it. Whether you’re fighting the game’s large, graphically detailed boss monsters (nearly all of which require you to think as well as react if you expect to prevail), or just a horde of plasma-spitting squid monsters, the combat is fast, fluid, and fun.

There are several ways to attack thanks to a number of physical forms Naija will be able to take as she moves through the game. One form allows her acrobatic thrusts and wall-leaps to become a weapon, another lets her create giant bramble pillars from the surrounding environment, and another allows her to hurl blasts of energy from her hands that home in on enemies.

The last of these can be considered the primary combat form, and it’s extremely fun to use. Regular shots can be fired with a click of the right mouse button, and three powered-up shots can be fired at once if the player holds the button down until Naija begins to glow. There are also “secret” methods of increasing her charged shot count to 4 and even 6 shots, and since they relate to physical movement, not powerups or hidden items, finding out how to do them is a bit of fun I don’t want to spoil. Using these more advanced techniques keeps the player moving around and clicking constantly in order to achieve maximum potency and good tactical positioning, so big battles quickly become furious and florid affairs that are great fun to watch. Naija’s different forms all look different as well, which gives some variety to her appearance, and since you can also find costumes in the world that change the look of her normal form when worn, she’s never dull to look at.

To change into these forms, Naija will use the “singing” system spoken of earlier. To activate it, the right mouse button is used to click on or near Naija when she’s in her normal form. A ring of 8 colored icons will then sprout around her, and as long as the button is held down, the cursor can be used to select them individually. When one is selected, players will hear a note that corresponds to the icon, and they can play a series of notes by simply moving the cursor from one to the other. Different combinations of notes will activate different songs (spells, essentially) and forms, and clicking both mouse buttons together on top of Naija if she’s in an alternate form will transform her back to normal at a moment’s notice. The system is fun to use, and even sounds great since each of the notes in the ring are tailored to the key of whatever background music is currently playing. Singing can also manipulate animals and the environment in a few unique ways, and is used many times as a tool for solving puzzles and challenges.

Tone deaf? Not a musical bone in your body? Never fear, you can still make use of the system, as each selection not only has a corresponding note, but also a corresponding shape and color. In fact, colorblind players will be the ones to have the most difficult time of it, though most puzzles and challenges make the appropriate notes apparent either by mimicking the position in which they appear around Naija, or by displaying the shape of each note instead of just the color, so hopefully even these players can manage without too much more than minor annoyance.

-- --

The game should ultimately last any player at least ten to fifteen hours, and that’s if they plan to rush through it just to finish the story, leaving large chunks of the main map unexplored and most treasures, secrets, optional bosses, and hidden powerups unlocated. But there’s a veritable smorgasbord of things to do and discover, and the game should run true completists somewhere in the realm of 25 to 30 hours or more, with those in the middle of such extremes logically between 15 to 25 depending on their love of finding treasures. No matter how you shake it, that’s a pretty serious amount of game in today’s world of four and five-hour wonders that meet or exceed Aquaria’s $30 (US) price point, and it’s made all the more impressive when you consider the quality of the content. If that somehow isn’t enough for you, you might also consider that the game ships with full mod support and an extremely powerful built-in editor that lets you craft levels on the fly as you play them! Your buck will bang like a grenade, and you'll have as much or more fun with Aquaria as you will with any game bought from a big-name studio this year.

Truthfully, any fan of old school games, 2D games, action/adventure games in general, or “Metroidvania” games in specific needs to give Aquaria a shot. There’s nothing to lose, as the substantial demo available on Bit Blot’s website packs in 2 to 4 hours of gameplay in under 70 megs, and the registered game will even import your demo saves if you’d prefer not to start things from scratch. Vista users should be okay for the most part, though some seemingly Vista-related issues have been reported (what, you’re surprised?). The game is also rumored to have an official Linux release in its future, but many Linux users report that the latest version of Wine runs the current Windows release without a hitch. About the only real caveat here is that there’s currently no official widescreen support, and while you can tweak an .INI file to get the game to stretch to your favored resolution, that certainly isn’t ideal. Still, widescreen support has been promised, and several small updates have already been released to address problems that pockets of users have experienced within the first days of the game’s launch, one such patch even coming together within an hour of the problem first being reported. Support, at least, doesn’t seem to be a problem.

As a final note, it's worth stating that though the game looks vibrant, colorful, and often friendly, parents should think before purchasing the game for their children. There are areas in both plot and environment that could creep out some younger kids (say, under 12) depending on their tolerances, and the game’s difficulty could lead to frustration for anyone, child or adult, without the skill to handle it.

In the end, we have many ways to spend our gaming dollar these days, and it can be hard to figure out what deserves our money and what doesn’t, so allow me to tell you on behalf of the many overwhelmingly positive Aquaria owners out there that this is one you shouldn’t let pass you by. If you’ve never checked out the independent game scene before, now’s the perfect time to start, and if you've followed the scene for a long time, prepare to have your faith in its potency restored a hundredfold.