Be a water nymph and befriend ducks in chillout game Naiad

There's a certain kind of indie game that's all about chill. You explore a slice of the natural world at your own pace, with a little puzzle-solving thrown in, but rarely anything likely to disrupt your meditative flow. The archetype is Flower, in which you're a gentle breeze that blows through fields rustling plants like some kind of invisible petal wizard, but there are plenty of others—games like Proteus, Feather, or Koi.

Naiad, which was shown during the Day of the Devs stream today, seems like a perfect example of the form. You play a water nymph right out of Greek myth who is born at the source of a river and grows up as she travels along it. You swim, dive, and do a froggy underwater dash as you help fish and other animals past obstacles like fallen logs, trash, and traps. Apparently you'll be able to make friends with ducks, butterflies, turtles, rabbits, and even snakes and crocodiles, as well as a talking cloud who acts as a guide.

Our water nymph protagonist collects vitality from leaves and flowers that fall in the river, and collects sunlight to make her hair grow. She can sing to call animals, make plants along the bank regrow, discover secrets including the river's "essences" as well as hidden poems, and restore color to this bright world where it grows dark.

It's not all putting flowers in your hair and splashing about with frogs, of course. Like in Flower, there's a spreading darkness whenever humans intrude on your world. Pipes pump pollution into the water and highways surround it with noisy, smoky traffic. Restoring nature by making flowers grow back along the riverbank seems like one way we'll have of gently pushing back, but presumably there are others. I'm not expecting the endgame to be full-on ecoterrorism, just a gentle rebuke of civilization's intrusion on this world of green lily pads and blue water.

Naiad is the work of Spanish indie developer HiWarp. The finished game will be a journey through 16 areas, including a spring, lake, and forest as well as dark caves, rapids, and swamp, ending as you flow out into the sea. It's scheduled for release this year on Steam.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

Read more
A screenshot from game Mudborne of a little humanoid frog in a marsh
We can't have Bloodborne on PC but we can have Mudborne, a thematically similar game about breeding frogs
Town in Tales of Seikyu with two townsfolk sat on the stairs
Tales of Seikyu is just your regular farming simulator, apart from the fact I've got shapeshifting abilities and I'm engaged to a pretty persistent kappa
A young witch watering a smiling mushroom in a magic garden
Here's a roguelite dungeon crawler Steam reviewers call 'a botanical Diablo' and 'like Cult of the Lamb' except you manage a mystical garden
Birds in a garden in Birdfull
This cosy birdwatching idle game has me leaving behind my binoculars and enjoying the hobby from the comfort of my desktop
Journey - a hooded character stand sin the desert
The 20 best cozy games on PC that aren't farm sims
Tiny Garden - A digital spherical capsule toy with a crank that has a small garden inside
Tiny Garden is an adorable Polly Pocket-sized farm sim where you crank a handle to grow crops
Latest in Adventure
Inside
Limbo and Inside studio demands compensation from co-founder Dino Patti for alleged 'unauthorized use of Playdead's trademarks and copyrighted works'
Two characters sitting on a bench talking
Wanderstop review
Zoe showing off in front of Mio
Split Fiction review
Rusty Rabbit chomping a carrot like a cigar
Rusty Rabbit turns Yakuza's Kazuma Kiryu into a fluffy bunny
Pathologic 3 screenshot
Get ready to get weird in Pathologic 3: Quarantine, a free 'prologue chapter' about a young doctor looking for immortality in the world's most miserable town
A young woman's face bathed in light
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 review
Latest in News
Man facing camera
The Day Before studio reportedly sues Russian website for calling infamous disaster-game a 'scam'
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam