Plenty Of Fish In The Sea

How Abzu’s art creates the dream of scuba diving

- Philippa Warr

Hundreds of thousands of fish swarm the screen as my diver arcs into the center of a bait ball, merging with the roiling mass of fins and faces, before popping out on the other side. The sheer number of moving objects on the screen is momentarily overwhelming. Abzu revels in moments like this, showcasing technical and aesthetic mastery via a digital sea packed with beautiful things to watch.

“I always try to communicate the game’s core ideas through the visual style,” explains Giant Squid’s creative director, Matt Nava. “Abzu is about the dream of scuba diving— we wanted to deliver the overwhelming sense of majesty, awe, and grandeur that one experiences when diving in the sea.”

The goal of Abzu’s art was not to offer a photorealistic underwater world, but one which evoked the sense of that world. “The way that we represented sea creatures and environments are meant to be iconic and symbolic rather than realistic, the style is an attempt to transport the player into a dream of the ocean.”

Abzu’s aesthetic is a mixture of realism and simplification. All of the creatures are based on animals in the real world but their forms are streamlined. They represent a type rather than an individual.

“Reality is full of detail and is often hard to visually parse,” says Nava. “In Abzu, there are hundreds of thousands of elements on the screen—huge shoals of fish, fields of seagrass, forests full of kelp leaves. We had to create a visual style that could both support identifiable species of fish and also not become pure noise when thousands of creatures fill the screen.”