To say this game is somewhat derivative of Journey is to state something pretty obvious not only at first glance, but after playing it and learning that the game director was art director on Journey.

There was another review stating that your enjoyment of this game is correlated to your enjoyment of Journey and I wouldn't be so sure of that. I love Journey. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and precisely because of that, playing Abzu just made me want to play Journey all over again.

Abzu has some neat ideas and I really dig the underwater controls, but following the same beats and seeing pretty much the same artistic elements as in thatgamecompany's work just makes me wonder why this game didn't try to follow another route.

Anyways, I didn't really enjoy it because of my previous experience with Journey, but still, it's a game I'm very much glad exists and would recommend it to many people I know for being a contemplative experience that doesn't need much gaming literacy.