Indie Game of the Week 392: Arietta of Spirits

Pull on your hoverboots and don those green tunics because we're back in Zeldersatz territory with this spooky October Indie Game of the Week: Arietta of Spirits by Third Spirit Games, released back in 2021. Arietta follows its eponymous preteen heroine as she vacations to a remote island retreat with her family, specifically to a cabin once occupied by her recently deceased and much loved grandma. Upon exploring the island Arietta discovers she has a rare gift for communing with the "spirit realm": a place between this world and the next. This naturally allows her to say her goodbyes to her lingering grandparent but also an opportunity to dig into the island's sordid secrets—the skeletons in its closet, if you'd prefer—with her new mustelid spirit guide friend Arco.

Arietta promises a lot early on with its impressive pixel art and music, creating a world not too dissimilar to ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley but with more of a heavy arboreal vibe as you run around its forested environments while following your nose for supernatural trouble. However, while the game has plenty of style it doesn't quite have the substance to match. Whenever I get on a tear about Indie Zeldersatzes I tend to focus on the way it prioritizes only part of the full Zelda package, largely due to the budgetary limitations of its developers compared to the big pile of money Nintendo's bigwigs always has on hand to throw at Eiji Aonuma whenever he comes sheepishly knocking on their shoji doors. That full Zelda package, in short, tends to include a mix of puzzle-solving dungeon instances, an elaborate enough combat system (depending on the era) full of evasive hops and lock-on attacks, and a whole wide world of NPCs and bonus objectives to explore for both those who are easily distracted and for those who get easily defeated and might be looking for some additional upgrades to buoy them through the next plot-mandated boss fight.

Arietta has almost none of that. It has combat, but only in the sense that you frequently need to swing your stick at something with a bad attitude bearing down on you, the local wildlife at first and then later some blob-like evil spirits called "roamers". You can upgrade your HP three times by filling leftover boss artifacts with the souls of other roamers and there's a couple of optional collectible quests—one that hearkens back to the squeaking Maiamai hunts of A Link Between Worlds and another that involves random manmade junk sold as curiosities by a ghostly trader unfamiliar with human inventions—but that's about all. For the most part, you're either running through a forest or running through a cave system bashing monsters and getting to the end. In most cases, you don't even have to fight anything besides pivotal bosses: the only thing regular enemies drop are hearts to recover the ones you lost because you chose to stop and fight them. It's that classic modern Paper Mario conundrum of being worse off the more you decide to grind enemies, not better off, and so you might as well just run from everything.

I'm not going to claim Arietta of Spirits is a complete waste of time. The presentation is great if you're a fan of pixels and the story, though light and intended for children, is affecting enough in its emotional moments and the few friendly spirits you meet make for memorable encounters. Discovering the tragedy that lies at the root of the island's ghost monster problem is a compelling hook also. It's just so much of the gameplay revolves around the so-so combat with absolutely nothing put towards satisfying exploration (everything is a linear path, to the extent that you don't even need world/dungeon maps nor are any provided) or engaging environmental puzzles to solve. The combat does improve slightly once you acquire the ability to create temporary shields, allowing you to tank or deflect incoming hits with the right timing, but given the limited number of enemy types to strategize around and the game's one and only weapon (a wooden sword) it can get dull fast. The boss fights are really the game's only saving grace in a gameplay sense, offering a challenge that tests the culmination of your skills polished from smacking around wasps and slimes for hours.

I did want to like Arietta more because Zeldersatzes are something I have a distinct fondness for, in part because The Legend of Zelda has this immutable blueprint that yearns for wilder variations from imaginative Indie devs with less to lose by pushing the proverbial red lion boat out, but maybe that has a downside where any action-adventure game with that familiar overhead view can't escape comparisons to the celebrated exploits of Elf Boy Shoots a Pig Wizard. Maybe Arietta just wanted to be something a lot more down-to-earth and simple in order to tell its story about loss and despair and greed and attract a broader, younger audience that perhaps was not interested in pushing switches and acquiring a whole trunk full of traversal-enabling gadgets across a 20-hour-plus long epic quest. It has every right to be that, of course, and maybe if I thought of it as an "Illusion of Gaia-like" instead I'd be giving it more of a fair shake. All the same, I can't help but walk away from Arietta of Spirits wishing there was more soul to be found in its attractive but largely hollow—if only from a gameplay perspective—shell.

Rating: 3 out of 5.