There is still grandeur in the crumbling monuments, in the powerful images of spirit beasts and old cogs turning in an abandoned factory, the creative use of geometry, light, and legend. Aesthetically, the game is already wonderful, but Forgotten Key produces magic with it through creative, compelling imagery, making the most of the style they chose. Both the overworld and the dungeons of AER are complemented by the absolutely marvelous lighting, with sunlight spilling into caves out of cracks, the brilliance of technology from another age, the glow from mushrooms and tears in reality. This was the best story aspect of AER to me - it shows the player that this world was once bursting with life in the past, others had done the same pilgrimage that you are doing, their dialogue alluding to other stories that you can engage with, that you can try to piece together yourself.ĪER‘s greatest strength lies in its visuals, with its low poly, geometric aesthetics and soft pastel palette. The only times that I did feel connected to the story was when I encountered the stationary, lingering spirits of people from the past and caught their fragments of dialogue. There is little to be gleaned from the environment itself. The player almost never feels that they found something for themselves because none of this knowledge was lost or waiting to be rediscovered - all of it is already known by the NPCs and by the remaining spirits in the land to be told to Auk, with even more recorded perfectly by the giant stone tablets. While this is not automatically poor storytelling, for a game about discovery and the exploration of this world’s ruins, it’s crippling. Whereas Journey is all show, with the complete lack of text leaving the environment to tell the story, letting the player’s imagination fill in what happened for themselves, AER does the exact opposite.

It is an unfortunate case of too much telling and not enough showing.

However, the legends and past of the world of AER are written so thoroughly and conveyed to the player with such certainty that all of the mystery and magic inherent in ancient myths are sucked away. We are told stories of the Creator, the champion Karah, and the spirits that remain in this land through NPC dialogue and the large tablets throughout the islands. While the islands are rather stark, the writing in the game does much to enrich the world with details, myths, and history. In some of the larger dungeons, you can get lost, which does require some wandering around until you find that next glowing diamond. With little variation to this formula throughout the game, eventually, you find yourself just going through the motions. It all requires little thinking of your own - there isn’t any specific order you have to activate these in because it’s all rather linear (unless you miss a passage, in which case you’ll have to backtrack and find it). Both are easy, with dungeons almost exclusively consisting of activating a glowing diamond shape somewhere in the area, spotting the next one, and platforming to it in order to open some doors or lower some bridges to progress. “The game is centered around exploration and discovery as Auk transforms into a bird to soar over floating islands and illuminates sleeping temples with her lantern.”Īuk cannot fly within the caves or dungeons found in the hollows of islands, so the game boils down to puzzles and platforming.

Aer memories of old review