Aquaria

The Good
I don't even know where to begin. For example I could write that the game has great visuals; but that barely says anything about the amazing and varied level design, the open backgrounds, the parallax scrolling combined with blur to give you sense of depth, the fantastic animations. You see it all and think it's amazing - and then you reach The Veil and suddenly it's even better. Then there's the level design, which uses all of the above tricks to make you feel like you're in a vast, open world while you're essentially swimming in corridors, and how brilliant that is because of the ability to attach to and jump off walls which is an essential part of the moveset and which would be useless otherwise. Then there's the sealife, both neutral and hostile, and how it's seemingly everywhere but at the same time so varied you can be sure you'll see something new every time you enter a new area. Then there's audio...

And so on. You get the idea.

So in short: The game has great visuals, great audio, great mechanics, huge open levels, is mostly nonlinear and over twenty hours long. Even something as simple as moving (swimming) around is enjoyable, and if that's not one of greatest praises I can give a platform game, I don't know what is.

The Bad
The entire story is utter bollocks. It's almost as if they made the whole game fist and then thought "Hmmm, we'll need a story", came up with something in a day over a pizza and slapped it on. It doesn't flow, doesn't build (or relieve) tension, and doesn't really tie in with rest of the game. It also suffers from a mild Shadow of Chernobyl Syndrome - where you are given no clues for majority of the game and then suddenly everything is explained to you just before the end and/or in the outro. And don't even get me started on the secret/"true" ending. Or Li.

Another, though minor, complaint is that some of the forms are more useful than others - default, Energy and Beast definitely get the spotlight, with the rest dealing mostly with reaching hidden/secret locations.

The Bottom Line
If it wasn't for the botched story, it would be pretty much a perfect game. But almost perfect is still pretty damn good.