Aetheris is providing me with a solid New Year’s Resolution: get better at strategy games. Even discounting the haze of Christmas alcohol that’s hung over me the past week, I was pretty rubbish at Aetheris. Though to be fair, it didn’t pull any punches either. It’s one of those games where a wrong move can come back to bite you with a vengeance. Every time I maneuvered one of my little lizard friends into the wrong position, I did feel a wrench in the heart.
Then they’d get bonked on the head or savaged by a giant bird and my flimsy house of cards would start to fall down. For fans of strategic combat, this is one to keep an eye on. Presuming you have a keener eye than me, that is. Fans of roguelites, however, might have more pause for thought. Aetheris presents itself very well but it has a cluster of issues that suggest to me that its different parts aren’t all gelling together.
Lizard Wizards
The most striking thing about Aetheris is the artstyle. If I had to describe it in a word, I would put it down as ‘papercraft’. It has that style of movement where everything wiggles back and forth like you’ve stuck those little split pins in everything. Watching your lizard friends march along is like a bizarre puppet theatre, especially when combined with the fantastically colourful backgrounds. Everything’s bright and colourful, actually. Bright primary colours everywhere. It’s a delight to watch; like someone has just gone mad with a colouring book. I love it.
It’s a little at odds with the gloomy storyline though. It’s the usual affair. A world of happy, little lizards gets turned upside down when the world cracks open, spewing forth a black mass. To investigate the corruption, four adventurers sally forth to meet it. I’d love to tell you that they solve it all at the end, but I never got that far. Still, Aetheris is more about the journey. Each little event reveals a bit more about the different types of lizards that live there and what horrible ends they’ve met. Lots of suspicious, tribal lizards and black ooze pushing its way through scales. There’s more depth to the world than first meets the eye, which I appreciated.
Not everyone is cheery, of course. The corruption, named the ‘shade’, is constantly chasing you. After a set number of turns, it’ll catch you and combat begins. It’s a turn-based affair, with your lizard friends positioned on a hex grid. Combat mainly involves getting your folks into position to smack the enemy or to chain together skills. It’s also D’n’D-esque, as you need to balance movement, attack and ‘spiritual’ points while keeping up the pressure. Even with my poor skills, it’s good fun – there’s a unique joy when a strategy pays off and a group of enemies topple like dominoes. There’s a lot of frustration but once you break through the wall, it’s great. That side of Aetheris works really well.
Scaly Rogues
The other main side of Aetheris is a roguelite. For each run, you pick four lizards to march forth. As they progress, they level up, picking from a set of personality traits, which dicate which cards you’ll draw for their skills, adding in some RNG spice. The stronger their personalities, the more choices open up in the overworld too. So if you have an empathetic lizard, you can be more generous towards people and are more likely to get healing abilities. As you travel, you meet different events as your lizard friends dictate your choices. You’ve got to balance that with the ever-encroaching shade. These events are generally the same each run, so you naturally start to learn the best way to deal with them.
That’s a double-edged sword, though. For one, while the events themselves can have different outcomes, the general course of things progresses the same each run. You choose a path at the beginning, have a couple of events, a battle, a camp, then repeat. It gets a little stale after a while, so subsequent runs tend to blur together. Even the battles are usually the same enemies each time. While the events themselves are nicely written, and some do have significant impacts, most are just flat stat changes – so I automatically went for the options that gave the best returns, regardless of any actual decision I wanted to make.
Alongside this are a cluster of smaller issues that make me think the roguelite element isn’t quite blending with the rest of Aetheris. For one, our lizardfolk don’t really have any defining elements. Visually, they’re hard to tell apart, which adds some frustration to the combat. The lack of classes or anything similar means that we only have minor stat differences and a level number to go by when we’re picking our initial team. We only get four chances before a game over too. It’s not a game you can grind through, which isn’t a bad thing. But it does mean once you’ve used up your higher level lads, you might as well chuck the save file in the bin.
Aetheris: In It For The Strategy
Ultimately, the biggest disconnect is between the roguelite elements and the combat. Fighting through a gruelling combat, only to die and have to do it all over again with new lads – with completely different skills – is quite galling. Once your characters start to die, it’s a slow crawl to failure. Not to say the roguelite half doesn’t have its share of good ideas. I like the spirit system, where dead characters can help out living ones, essentially giving them a second life. My gut feeling though is that the roguelite elements subtract more than they add.
If there was more variety – more randomised battles or a greater choice of path to take – it might have made things gel a bit more. As it was, I was more interested in the combat than the roguelite elements. It was quite frustrating to be sent back to square one just to have another crack at a boss. Still, it wasn’t so painful that I found myself giving up. There’s a lot of fun to be had in Aetheris; in the world and combat it presents, even if it does feel a little muddled at times.
