Aquaria is a game that revels in simple pleasures: in the joy of lithe movement in its underwater world; in exploring new and potentially treacherous areas; in slaughtering harmless fish. Indeed, your first half an hour with the game is almost meditative – swimming through caves and tunnels, mastering the straightforward movement controls, avoiding predators and communing with the surprisingly friendly jellyfish. It's a smooth introduction, and a wow gold mirror of protagonist Naija's heretofore solitary life. Who is she and what happened to her people? These are the questions that spur her on into the wider world of Aquaria.

Within its lovingly hand-painted environments Aquaria very much takes a number of classic game designs as inspiration. You'll see shades of Super Metroid and Castlevania in Aquaria's progression system, a smattering of Zelda in the song spells, and a decent dose of space shooter gameplay in its combat. That's by no means a bad thing, and indie developer Bit Blot – comprised of two guys – has done a great job pulling it all together (for the demo or to buy the full game, head to the website).

The controls are largely very good. Naija can navigate the waters entirely through mouse control should you wish. Just hold down the left mouse button and move the cursor to guide her, or you can click at a distance to dash in that direction. There's also direct control using the old WASD config, and we found ourselves using both. Combat in wow gold Aquaria can get quite hectic – some chambers are filled with predators chasing you and firing off projectiles, so the ability to directly control Naija through the maelstrom, while shooting and aiming with the mouse, is an important option.

Controls aren't perfect, however. We found the dash move – which is also used to dash and grip to walls – a little frustrating. In enclosed spaces we found ourselves leaping from wall to wall when all we wanted to do was move through the area at speed. Despite this small niggle the sense of gliding and smooth movement has been captured fantastically wow powerleveling well. There are also other nice touches in the controls too, such as the ability to spin the cursor around Naija to create a whirlpool of sorts. Very handy for clearing off the hard-shelled little creatures which occasionally attach themselves to Naija and slow her movement.

The map system is pretty solid too. On entering a new area it shows you the full layout of tunnels, with areas lighting up once you've explored them. There are a couple of drawbacks, however. One is that the map is divided into sections, with the area you're currently in focused upon. Unfortunately, while you can see the layout of the other areas beyond the current map, you can't see which sections you've explored and which you haven't unless you swim into that particular section again. In such a large world, where it can take quite a while to get around, that's a bit of a drawback. It also would have been great to be able to annotate the map. It's all too easy in such a large world to come across – say – a blocked entrance, then to forget where the hell it was when you've gained the ability to open it. For some that will be part wow powerleveling of the appeal, but for us it meant that we wound up spending a lot of time scouring areas a second or third time, making sure we'd explored every possible avenue.
There's one area above all others, however, in which we believe Bit Blot missed a great opportunity – puzzles. While there are certainly some neat puzzles in the game – both in opening the way forward and in defeating some of the more terrifyingly large beasts you'll come up against, a stronger emphasis on them would have been appreciated. As it stands, the gameplay is much more focused on exploration and combat, which can start to wear a little thin. More puzzles would have resulted in a more rounded gameplay balance.

Even so, Aquaria is quite a stunning effort from such a small team, and it's hard not to be won over by the game's sense of atmosphere and visual style. As opposed to a title like Undertow on XBLA, Aquaria is much more old school in its approach to visuals, utilising hand-painted environments and creatures. It may not have fancy real-time lighting, but when a shaft of hand-drawn light pierces the water in this game, it's every bit as impressive. Bit Blot has also made great use of colours and tone in creating its world. The difference between rich blue sea close to the surface and exploring the deep, dark depths is obviously marked, as is exploring the warm cocoon that is Naija's home versus the ruins of ancient civilisations, or the kelp forest, or the occasional fleshy, blood red tunnel.