Aquarelle Review for Steam

Aquarelle is a virtual museum designed for players to adventure and explore a surreal, relaxing atmosphere with light parkour elements. Developed and published by Andreev Worlds, Aquarelle takes place in virtual space, where its creator, D-504, fell into. It’s your job to find a way out.

Aquarelle is an easygoing walking simulator where you get to view and explore 6 small exhibits featuring parts of Andreev Worlds’ other completed, or scrapped, or unfinished projects. The idea and content of this game is comparable to the Insomniac Museum in the Ratchet & Clank series. This whole game seems like an amalgamation of those mostly unfinished projects into one game demo to showcase what atmospheres Andreev Worlds is capable of producing.

When initially starting, I was impressed with the catchiness of the electro house music and the abstract aesthetic of the game. I am a fan of the Mirror’s Edge series and I was ecstatic when initially playing through the tutorial because the tutorial made it seem like parkour was a key aspect of the game. However, the tutorial is the worst part of the game.

The concept for Aquarelle is not inherently bad, it just is plagued with bugs and inconsistent mechanics and feels too barren at times, which is partially justified by surrealism. When I launched the game for the first time, it took a few minutes for me to realize that the default volume was set to 0 and I was unable to use my mouse to rotate my camera, so I restarted the game. As I played through the tutorial the 2nd time, I ran into another glitch where I could not climb ladders or poles unless I was specifically looking at a 45 degree angle away from the object I was climbing, this made the pole-climbing section impossible because I could not jump from pole to pole. I did encounter other bugs like not being able to jump as well as my stamina bar not appearing.

The tutorial’s pole-climbing section was a nightmare. The tutorial never explains how to jump to poles that you cannot turn towards and look at directly. The game leaves it to the player to figure it out yourself, but the issue is that there is fall damage and every time you die, you have to restart the entire tutorial which will take about 5-8 minutes to get back to the pole-climbing section. This disastrous oversight could partly be remedied by having checkpoints so every time a player dies from falling, they could immediately restart that section and not waste time on the other basic tutorial sections that eat up too much time. I spent more time trying to do the tutorial than actually playing through the game. The last section of the tutorial also does a poor job explaining how the hook feature works and it is very inconsistent and not programmed well.

Although there is a decent foundation for parkour mechanics, the game almost never makes use of it after the tutorial. Once you actually start the game, you make your way through a linear path looking for scraps of paper that give the player insight on what they have to do as well as some of the developer’s random thoughts or background information on their other projects. Different music plays as you reach certain areas. Two notable music tracks in the game that I loved are Kavinsky’s, “Nightcall” as well as a catchy tech-house remix of Gary Jules’, “Mad World.”

Once you get past the tutorial, Aquarelle does offer players a relaxing atmosphere to enjoy. The ceiling is endless white space and there are giant statue heads and cats that decorate the world, which one can admire and interpret in their own way. Models and textures range from bland to gorgeously detailed and this is one of the aspects that stuck with me most.

Aquarelle could have been a decent artistic game but suffers immensely for having an unskippable, bad tutorial, not having enough or having badly placed checkpoints, and having hardly anything to interact with. Not including the tutorial, it took me 2.5 hours to explore almost all of the game’s content. Some of the most fun I had in the game was spinning around on a playground roundabout and riding on a playground swing. At the time of writing this review, Aquarelle is on Steam for $59.99USD and I personally do not think it is worth that price.  

Verdict: Not Recommended

Check Out the Aquarelle Trailer:

Aquarelle is available for PC via Steam. For more information, please visit: https://andreev.world/

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