There’s a specific kind of calm that comes from moving water, the sort that makes you forget whatever you were stressed about the moment a boat starts drifting. Venice built an entire industry on that feeling, and Aquadine bottles it up so well that I caught myself missing gondola rides I’ve never actually taken. Can a slow trip through painted canals really carry a whole visual novel on its own? I went in doubting it. I’m still turning the question over now that I’ve finished, and that lingering doubt says more about this game than any five-star pull quote would.
Character portraits carry a soft, rounded art style that fits the coastal setting. Writer and director Brian Trieu built in a small touch where portraits shake slightly during moments of heightened emotion, a subtle bit of motion that keeps static dialogue scenes from feeling too still. The background art leans into the Venice inspiration hard, all sun-warmed canals and market streets, and the CG illustrations reserved for key story beats hold up well against the sprite work around them. The UI stays decorative without getting in the way, dressed in the same warm color palette as everything else.
The town itself sets the tone before a single character opens their mouth. Modeled openly on Venice, Aquadine is a canal city built around a founding legend. Centuries back, its people prayed to the sea god Levios during a famine. He agreed to help on one condition, that humans share the city with merfolk. Peace held for a while. It broke down eventually, the merfolk retreated into the sea, and Levios raised them an underwater kingdom that later took on the town’s name. A forbidden romance between one of those merfolk and a human sailor is blamed for the fall of that original city, and the surface town of Aquadine was built afterward in tribute to it. None of this gets dumped on the reader at once. It surfaces in pieces, mostly through the kind of casual conversation you’d overhear from locals who grew up hearing the story secondhand.
Robin Liyun is the one steering us through it, though for most of the town he’s better known by a different name. His mother Torrie has been hospitalized with an illness nobody’s identified. To help cover the bills he’s taken up her old job piloting tour gondolas under the alias Ciel, a warmer, more outgoing persona than the anxious high schooler underneath it. The double life isn’t played for cheap farce. Robin struggles to reconcile who he is in front of his mother’s old customers with who he is in class, and the story treats that tension as a real source of stress rather than a gimmick to hang jokes on. One evening, mid-tour, he hears singing coming from somewhere in the water that shouldn’t have anyone in it.
The friend group around him carries a good chunk of the writing’s weight. Diana works the counter of her family’s café and is being quietly worn down by a strict parent who expects her to take over the business whether she wants to or not. Cameron is the group’s relentless source of physical energy, the one who drags everyone off the couch and into whatever plan he’s cooked up that week. Elisabeth transferred in partway through the story with a reputation as a former singer who mysteriously stopped performing, and she deflects any question about why. Anya rounds out the main five as the quiet, artistically inclined one who tends to sit at the edges of group scenes rather than the center of them. Their supporting cast, including a teacher with ties to Robin’s family history and a house cat named Banjo who gets irritable on command, fills in the town without pulling focus from the five leads.
Brian Trieu built Aquadine as his first project after spending time recruiting artists and composers through Lemma Soft and DeviantArt communities. He’s cited Aria the Animation as the model for the Venice inspired setting, The Little Mermaid and Nagi no Asukara for the underwater lore, and CLANNAD for the story’s focus on family. That family influence shows clearly in how much narrative real estate goes to Robin’s mother, rather than sidelining her the way a lot of anime style stories do with parent characters. The studio name SoftColors comes from two opening themes he admired, Tomoyo After’s “Light Colors” and Code Geass’s “Colors,” which tracks with how much care went into this game’s own opening song later.
Structurally, Aquadine runs on a common route of around three hours that all five friends share. After that, the story hands you one real choice: pick a character and follow their route to its own individual ending. Complete all four of the non-Robin routes and a fifth segment called Memories unlocks, functioning as the story’s true finale. It’s a clean, low-friction structure for a kinetic novel, since the game drops you straight back at the choice screen on repeat visits instead of forcing a replay of the common route each time.
Where the writing runs into trouble is pacing within the individual routes themselves. Scenes have a habit of cutting away right as they’re building toward something, jumping to a new character or setting before a thread gets to breathe. I felt real forward momentum in maybe two of the four character routes, while the others read more like extended slice-of-life vignettes despite setup that promised bigger stakes. It’s a frustrating gap given how strong the groundwork is elsewhere, closer to a story that got trimmed for pacing than one that never had the ideas to begin with.
The emotional core is stronger than the pacing issues would suggest. That first encounter on the water, Robin alone in his gondola hearing a voice he can’t place, does a lot of work establishing the sense that something just outside explanation is watching this town. It’s a small moment, just him and the water and a song with no visible singer. But it’s the hinge the rest of the mystery swings on. The game earns the unease it’s going for without needing a jump scare or a dramatic sting to sell it. Loss runs underneath nearly everything here too, in Robin’s worry over his mother and in how each friend is quietly working through something they’re not saying out loud. The game lets those feelings sit rather than resolving them too neatly.
Music carries just as much of the load. The opening theme, “Vast Blue Sea,” features vocalist Sagi and was produced by composer Farhan Sarasin, setting an ambitious tone right from the title screen. It’s one of three fully vocal songs woven through the game rather than saved for just the intro and credits. The background score leans on a smaller set of recurring tracks that loop across multiple scenes, which keeps the soundtrack from feeling as expansive as the visuals. The tracks themselves are well suited to the setting though, and they never wear out their welcome the way reused BGM sometimes can.
Voice work here is partial rather than full, built from short vocal stock phrases layered under the text rather than complete voiced lines. Sometimes a line matches what’s on screen almost exactly. Other times a character will let out something closer to an affectionate murmur of a name while the text says something longer. The tone consistently lands right even when the words don’t sync up literally. Heidi Tabing brings real warmth to Torrie despite limited material, and Jane Redd gives Anya a quietly expressive read that fits her more reserved role in the group. It’s not full voice acting, but the casting clearly got real thought put into it rather than being an afterthought layered on late.
Aquadine originally released on PC through Steam and itch.io in February 2021, with itch.io also offering Mac, Linux, and Android builds, before a separate console port followed roughly a year and a half later. The PC release I’m covering here plays cleanly, without navigation issues or the kind of software hiccups that occasionally dog small-studio visual novel releases. The choice screen returning you straight to route selection is a real convenience for anyone replaying to catch every ending.
Verdict
Aquadine is a soft, patient visual novel that gets more right than wrong. It’s anchored by a likable cast, a setting with real texture to it, and presentation work well above what a first-time solo-directed project usually manages. The story’s reach occasionally outpaces its pacing, with individual routes that promise more tension than they deliver. But the emotional beats that do land, land well. The world built around Robin and his friends stays interesting even when the plot itself slows down.
