NAIAD Review

Naiad is a beautiful and relaxing puzzle game. You’ll swim around and solve small environmental puzzles, like bringing the ducklings back to their mama duck or bringing the butterflies to a beautiful plant. No missable achievements, completion takes around 10 hours.

Naiad is a beautiful and relaxing puzzle game. You’ll swim around and solve small environmental puzzles, like bringing the ducklings back to their mama duck or bringing the butterflies to a beautiful plant. No missable achievements, completion takes around 10 hours.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 10 hours when playing first through the game without using a guide
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Yes, here
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

In Naiad, you play as this small creature and solve environmental puzzles. Finding sunspots will let you grow, and through the game, you’ll unlock some small new abilities, like singing and being able to play a music mini-game and swimming like a frog or swimming faster.

I’m impressed with how the Naiad tells a story without really telling the full story. You get hints on what you’re doing, but it isn’t totally clear until the end, or maybe even till the true ending. There is a character who will talk you down a bit in the game, and while I normally hate that or feel discouraged by something like that, this game did it in a way that made me just want to prove that character wrong. Naiad will also tell you the story of how bad humanity is for nature but that there are people fighting to stop that while this isn’t the main focus of the game.

What I love about the gameplay is that the puzzles are quite small. They feel like bite-size puzzles and are never overwhelming, which helps so much with this game feeling so zen and relaxing. Another great thing is how fluid your movement feels. In some games, it is such a drag to swim, but in this game, it feels so easy and just good.

The game looks stunning, and it has great sound effects and beautiful music. After some of the music mini-games, I stayed in the area just to hear that music for a little longer.

Achievement-wise, you don’t have to do everything, and missed things can easily be mopped up with chapter selection. Don’t worry about finding all the small fish or all the animals. I would recommend following a summoned bird after solving each of the bird puzzles and finding all parts of the poem and the essence. However, you can easily tell in which chapter you’re missing those, and with how small the levels are, if you don’t focus on solving everything but just the things you are missing, it is easy to mop up the stuff you missed. Because of this, I highly recommend that your first playthrough is without a guide and, afterward, just mop up what you missed. Just enjoy the story, try to find all the secrets, and don’t worry about the things you missed.

I give Naiad 4,5 out of 5 stars.

This review for NAIAD was written on 5 January 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 53 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.