There are 1188 items in my GOG Galaxy list of purchased games. I've played a small minority of them. Lately I've decided to challenge myself to work through this list alphabetically, from A to Z, spending at least an hour on each game in the list, until the list runs out, or I run out of enthusiasm.
Lately I've spent some time playing...
Aer: Memories of Old (Daedelic Entertainment, 2017)
I started playing Anthem recently. At $16.99 on the PSN it finally descended to a price point low enough for me to decide it was a purchase that was essentially without risk, especially with rumours circulating that Bioware is going to attempt to make good on some of the game’s promise with Anthem 2.0 in 2020. And having played a bit in co-op with a friend, it’s easy to see both why the game seemed to have promise and why the game doesn’t work: it weds an immediately compelling premise (fly around like Iron Man!) to some uninteresting lore (Scar! Anthem of Creation! Ciphers!), and then shoots itself in the foot by preventing you from fully indulging the compelling premise (walk around like Iron Man, because we are not going to let you fly right now!).
If I’m currently waiting on Anthem 2.0, I think I just visited Anthem 0.5 in Daedelic Entertainment’s Aer: Memories of Old. For the sake of full disclosure, I didn’t finish Aer, even though it apparently clocks out at about three hours. Instead, I gave up on it what turned out to be precisely the one hour mark, after missing a jump.
Missing a jump…in a game where my character can fly.
I want to like Aer. I’d settle for even respecting Aer, but like Anthem it takes a very fun idea (turn into a bird and soar around!), weds it to some uninteresting lore (Shrines! Lighthouses! Myths about how man is fundamentally separated from nature and must reconnect to it!), then proceeds to deny you access to the fun idea (you can’t turn into a bird right now, and also you missed that jump, so back to the beginning with you).
And Aer puts a decent foot forward, dropping you onto a wide open world of floating islands after a tedious but blessedly short introductory dungeon, telling you how to turn into a bird, and letting you fly around. And the flying is a lot of fun for the most part – your character transitions smoothly into and out of her bird form easily and quickly, the game’s soft colour palette and lovely art direction make the idea of soaring through the world immediately agreeable, and its mellow guitar-and-piano soundtrack provide a soothing environment to soar through. There are no enemies, no brightly coloured rings to fly through, just a seemingly endless expanse of clouds and waterfalls and tiny, picturesque islands. For a moment I thought I’d wandered into a soothing, atmospheric, Proteus-as-a-bird game that would simply invite me to soar around the word, land to splash around in ponds or sit under trees, and take a few deep breaths before I got back to whatever it was I was supposed to be doing otherwise.
But no, Aer has a story, and Aer has shrines you should visit, and Aer is trying to tell you something, and it would very much like it if you’d listen. And there’s nothing wrong with having a message, and as I said I didn’t finish Aer so maybe it turns out to have very good message, but as soon as the game started talking about the Void of Greed at the heart of man, and started suggesting that maybe technology was the problem and trees were the solution, and a magic fox turned up to help me reconnect to nature, I have to confess I started to roll my eyes. ‘We have become estranged from our natural state and must reconnect to it’ is hardly trailblazing as The Big Message goes. I feel like it’s second only to The Best Thing You Can Be Is Yourself, and I find The Best Thing You Can Be Is Yourself is a message both more likely to be true and less condescending than dire warnings about the risks of technology.
And once I got to the game’s first shrine, an enemy-free maze of doors and switches (Aer has no combat that I saw), I felt as if the wheels fell off completely. Up until this point the flying had been the most enjoyable part of the game. I have to confess that when I flew through a cloudbank into a tunnel of swirling mists for a moment, the simple elegance of the art direction took my breath away. So when I landed (after solving a simple switch puzzle) and entered the dungeon I was ready to explore in bird form, flying from platform to platform, engaging with vertical spaces, really getting into the nitty gritty of what the game would let me do in bird form, I was shocked to discover that once there was a roof over my head, I was no longer able to transform.
As with Anthem, I’ll wonder for a long time what possessed the developers of Aer to say ‘let’s make a game about flying where for chunks of the game you cannot fly’, because it really drives home both games’ other shortcomings when you take away the thing that should presumably be the first floor of your elevator pitch. Without the flying, Anthem is Destiny, right down to the tedious lore and the endless succession of Proper Nouns; without its own flying, Aer has actually very game little left at all. When she can’t turn into a bird, your character can run, jump, and produce a magical lantern to carry that occasionally makes the invisible visible, and this doesn’t provide for a lot of variety in dungeon crawling. There are only so many times you can jump onto a platform to flip a switch before you start wishing for a bow and arrow to shoot switches with at a distance, or iron boots that let you explore underwater. When you strip out Aer’s flying it’s really just Proteus after all – there’s not a lot of gameplay there, and whereas Proteus leaned into that and tried to produce a contemplative, meditative experience out of its simplicity, Aer seems to think that without the flying it’s still interesting to play.
There’s not even an explanation presented to you for why you can’t fly when you go inside, not even a throwaway line about how you need to be able to see the sun or something. I feel like that would have helped, maybe? Instead, the game just stops letting you do the cool thing. The first time I fell in Aer it was because I assumed I would be able to fly in an area and then just couldn’t. Whump. And I tried, after that initial spike of disappointment and confusion – I ran around the dungeon and jumped from thing to other thing and pulled out the lantern and hit A to press switches, but it just wasn’t pleasurable to be given this ability to fly only to have it taken away during the period of the game it would have been most interesting to use it in. And then I missed a jump and fell and was going to have to climb back up, on foot, in a game where I can fly. So I stopped instead.
Aer, at least, failed for me in an interesting way – I’ve started and jumped over a couple of games since writing about Aaero (Absolver, Abzu, Acceleration of Suguri 2), but Aer’s the first one to glance off me in a way that made me want to write about it. So it’s got that going for it. But there’s a reason that the cliché is for people to dream of flying, not walking, and somehow the developers of Aer seem to have missed that memo. So, as excited as I was to sit down for it, and as interesting to think about as its shortcomings are, Aer wound up being a pass for me.
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