I’ll admit: I’m a sucker for creature collectors. From Pokémon to Moonstone Island, I’ve played quite a few in my many gaming years. There’s nothing quite like bonding with a series of pixels and then using them to beat the ever-living snot out of other pixels. And as a certified adult gamer, I also love roguelikes and roguelites due to their replayable nature. It’s tough to commit to an 80-hour narrative-driven RPG, but a roguelike where a single run can take 30 minutes and each playthrough is its own experience? Sign me up.
Now take both of these genres and smash them into one, and you get Aethermancer, a gorgeous new title that launched in early access on Sept. 23. Aethermancer is the little sibling to Monster Sanctuary, a creature-collecting metroidvania out of indie developer Moi Rai Games. It’s very clear that the team has taken lessons from its first title and expanded on them to craft what’s an enjoyable adventure for fans of both roguelites and monster-tamers.
Aethermancer is a beautiful representation of the two genres in one, and it’s got a lot to offer for those who enjoy the nuance and difficulty roguelites can be known for. It’s worth picking up for anyone looking for their next adventure, though it’s not without its flaws.
Mastering monsters and mechanics
The premise of Aethermancer is simple: You play as Siriux, a mage-like being called an Aethermancer who enters the dark world of the void to “catch” and battle monsters. Monsters fight in teams of three with a mana system in turn-based combat, with five different types of mana based on various elements. These creatures serve different roles; you’ve got tanks, supports, and damage-dealers. Sprinkle in poison, stagger, and crit systems; mana-control skills, and other debuffs, and you’ve got a variety of nuanced archetypes to build a team around.
There are three main biomes to explore in a run, and you’ll need to make your way through three to four different rooms per biome. At the end of each room, you have an option of which type of room you want to enter next. Some harbor a merchant where you can buy items and experience points for your monsters. Others feature rare item drops that benefit your beasties in each combat. But every room has gold and Aether Crystals to collect and hordes of monsters to fight to train your team up. As your monsters level up, you can pick from a set of randomized traits or abilities that further shape your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Each biome is home to around eight different monsters you can catch and add to your team, totaling over 50 monsters in the game. You aren’t guaranteed to see every type of monster in one run. It took me several runs before I saw every monster species the first biome had to offer. Similarly, monsters can come in “Shifted” variations, like Shinies in Pokémon. This feature adds to the replayability of the game, further rewarding you for starting new runs and keeping the gameplay experience new and exciting each time.
At the end of each run, you respawn in Pilgrim’s Rest, a town of personable NPCs who grant boons for future runs. From upgrading usable items to unlocking new paths that house different creatures, these friendly NPCs make future runs easier—if you pay them enough Aether Crystals, that is. You’ll also find new NPCs throughout your runs who will appear in Pilgrim’s Rest the next time you return to the town. NPCs come with their own dynamic dialogues as well, offering story and world-building elements to add to the game’s overall appeal.
That’s about where Aethermancer’s simplicity ends. There’s a lot to the roguelite, and it took me a few runs before I began to grasp most of the gameplay mechanics. And I’m someone who loves roguelikes like Slay the Spire or Wildfrost, both of which have their fair share of archetypes, mechanics, and combat effects. This nuance would normally make it difficult to recommend the game to newbies to the genre or players who want gameplay loops that are easier to understand. But there are accessibility options that disable the game’s Corruption system or make enemies weaker, opening the door for those who seek a more forgiving gameplay experience.
Growing pains: Early-access wobbles
Games in early access often end up looking quite different when they launch in full. Most gamers who’ve been with a title in their early development cycles know to expect bugs or future balancing changes as the developer polishes the edges. In my nearly 15 hours with Aethermancer, though, I only encountered one bug and a few other minor shortcomings.
At the beginning of a save, the game allows you to choose one of four starter monsters. But after I selected my starter in my very first run, I tried to name it and was then able to select a second after the selection menu glitched back in. These initial starters are very rare and can be quite powerful, and because I had two of these beasts, I got to the third biome on my first try. This bug only happened in my initial save file, but I ended up restarting my journey through the void in a separate save to play the game as intended.
The game’s biggest challenge, though, came from its own combat interface. Certain symbols are small and hard to decipher, causing abilities to occasionally look different in combat than they do when you inspect them in a monster’s menu. The game indicates what attack your opponent is about to use by showing an ability symbol over their head—and this information is crucial to making decisions about how you will respond during your turn. On occasion, I’d inspect the monster through its ability menu to decide whether I wanted to block the attack, but because I couldn’t easily decipher which ability was being used, I had to open and close the menu multiple times to try to figure it out.
One of the great aspects of early access, though, is that developers often listen to player feedback and will frequently release plans for bug fixes or incoming features. As of Sept. 26, just three days after Aethermancer launched in early access, Moi Rai released a Reddit post with an ample list of bug fixes and indicated to players that a roadmap with future updates would be released in the near future.
Is Aethermancer worth its price tag?
Aethermancer is currently listed at roughly $20, a comparable price to similar titles like Wildfrost. It’s also already reached a “Very Positive” score on Steam with nearly 900 ratings, showing most players enjoyed their time with the game. And I, myself, am one of those players. I found Aethermancer to be challenging and intriguing in its gameplay. The monster designs are unique and several archetypes are fun to build around, leaving me excited to discover new creatures and pick from the list of randomized abilities as my team level up. My only complaints are that I wish the biomes offered more diversity and there was more to the NPC system; a friendship system or multiple dialogue options would improve interactions with characters greatly.
We’ve yet to see the roadmap and what Moi Rai has planned for the future of Aethermancer, so we could see improvements to these systems as the game approaches its full release. Despite this, I’m quite pleased with what we currently have. Aethermancer isn’t free of flaws, but it’s got an enjoyable gameplay loop that offers a challenge any roguelite or creature-collector fan is sure to appreciate.
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