Image by Pontus Ullbors
The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human is a post-apocalyptic Metroidvania Action-Adventure game by the Swedish indie developer YCJY, which was released on PC through Steam on January 9, 2016. In January 2018, the game was also ported to Playstation 4 and Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch port following in January 2019.
In it, you are the only crewmember of the spaceship/submarine Argo 9, exploring the Earth thousands of years after mankind went extinct and the Earth flooded due to melting of the polar ice caps. You meet lots of frightening and gigantic sea creatures during your quest to survive and to find out what happened to humanity.
See Song of the Deep for another underwater Metroidvania that was released in 2016.
This game provides examples of:
- Auto-Save: You know that a boss fight is coming when you see that the game is saving while you enter a big room.
- Boss Game: The bosses are the only real challenge besides some obstacles which you need upgrades for, but that's why there are so many of them.
- Background Boss: The False Light spends most of its time in the background.
- Battle Theme Music: Every boss has a different one.
- Boss Battle: The boss battles are a pretty big part of the game because they are the only parts of the game where you have to fight. This has drawn some comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus, another game which consists of a series of boss battles.
- Boss Room: If there's a huge room, there's a 85% chance that you will fight a boss there.
- Boss Rush: You can play it after you played through the normal game. You even get an achievement for beating the Boss Rush!
- Boss Subtitles:
- Tunneling Terror: The Worm
- Proud Stallions of the Sea: The Fathers
- Ancient Peacekeeper: The Tranquil
- Slumbering Behemoth: The forgotten One
- It dwells in the Dark: The False Light
- Deep Sea Shoal: The Chain Gang
- Unstoppable Crustacean: The Defiler
- Atomic Bubblegum: The Parasite
- Blood fueled Leviathan: The Experiment
- Floral Monstrosity: The Heart of the City
- Facility Defense Drone: The Guardian.
- Collapsing Ceiling Boss: Rocks fall from the roof in the fight against the Tranquil and the False Light.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Let's see...
- The Worm just rips apart and spews out lots of little worms.
- The Tranquil has one of the most cruel deaths in the whole game. You can shoot all its tentacles off, reducing it to nothing more than a limbless cripple before shooting its defenseless body.
- The False Light implodes while its eyes burst like balloons.
- The big shark and the "leader" of the Chain Gang gets its skin ripped off its face upon swimming into one of its mines, and its head explodes after it makes the same mistake twice.
- The Defiler just walks straight into the opening of a huge car crusher. The player gets the privilege to see how the machine starts while the creature cries and screams, pounding against the walls with its claws, leaving visible dents on the outside. It does not help and blood flows out of a another smaller opening, followed by a red, sticky cube with still visible eyes in it. Yikes!
- Cruel Twist Ending: All the senseless killing, getting upgrades, fighting monsters and smashing through obstacles was for nothing as you still die at the end because your submarine shuts off, sinking to the bottom of the big, blue ocean.
- Didn't Need Those Anyway!: The Forgotten One likes to throw its bones around just to collect them later in the fight for small health boosts.
- Deus est Machina: Osiris, whose name is dropped in text logs at several points in the game, is revealed to be an Artificial Intelligence designed to help humanity deal with its social and environmental problems - in its own words, "a god who truly cares." While it manages to help solve most of humanity's problems, in the end it decides that the only way to save the Earth from destruction is to "stabilize the population" (read: stabilize at none left) of humans.
- Expy:
- The Guardian looks very similar to one of the Sentinels from the Matrix movies, with a bulbous main body, segmented tentacles and glowing red "eyes".
- A piece of scenery in one region is clearly a pixelated rendering of the "flashlight head" of a Geth from the Mass Effect series.
- "Instant Death" Radius: There's a reason why you have to destroy the tentacles of the Tranquil first before attacking his body.
- Kaiju: All the bosses are abnormally gigantic or mutated creatures.
- Last of His Kind The player character, as stated by the title. The premise of the game is to uncover why the rest of humanity went extinct.
- Man-Eating Plant: The Heart of the City is a gigantic carnivorous plant.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The Forgotten One is a giant, rotting undead fish, apparently somehow kept alive by pollution. It can dissolve its flesh into a toxic, sentient cloud, leaving behind its skeleton, and will periodically pursue the player as a cloud for a while before reassembling into its original form.
- Sand Worm: The first Boss does not dig through sand, but everything else fits to the image of the stereotypical sand worm.
- Sea Mine: They are around 20 meters big. This doesn't stop most players from swimming into them.
- Sea Monster: Nearly every creature you encounter could count as this just because everything is THAT big. Even the harmless fish swimming around are bigger than your submarine.
- Side View: Wouldn't be a true Metroidvania game without it.
- Stationary Boss: The Heart of the City is a plant, so don't expect too much movement from it.
- Stock Ness Monster: There is a creature that you can find in the Seaweed Forest that kinda looks like the Loch Ness monster, with the long neck and all.
- Threatening Shark: The Chain Gang consists of dozens of hammerhead sharks and an enormous tiger shark, which drags two sea mines on chains behind it.
- Underwater Boss Battle: Every last one. Considering the game is set on an Earth that's been completely flooded over, this should not come as a surprise.
- Who Forgot The Lights?: The deep sea is not known for being bright, and you have to find the lamp upgrade to fix that.
