Roguelite fans have been eating good this year for sure. From the eruption of games in the city-builder/rogue-lite subgenre with games like The King is Watching and Drop Duchy, to the huge release of Hades 2, it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd at the moment.
But what’s this? A new challenger approaches? That’s right, from the makers of Monster Sanctuary comes Aethermancer, a new hybrid game which takes monster-capturing and infuses another genre into it, this time being the Roguelite.
With Aethermancer starting in Early Access this week, I’ve been fortunate enough to play a good 10 hours of this game in the last few days. Is it worth taking a look at from fans of Pokémon or the Roguelite genre? Let’s see!
Ah, What A Lovely Void
You play as Siriux, an Aethermancer, who has decided to jump into the Void in order to see if he can save the world from being absorbed by it. To help him, he controls monsters, which he can use to battle in turn-based form.
Quick dictionary on ‘Aether’ –
- Aethermancer – a sort of magician who can wield Aether, the magic of the world
- Aether – separated into four elements of earth, fire, water, and air, and then also ‘wild’, which is sort of like colorless in Pokémon TCG
You’re also assisted by the Monsterkin, who are sort of sentient monsters that inhabit the areas which are currently being absorbed by the Void.
These Monsterkin take the form of animals with human characteristics, from a capybara mayor of Pilgrim’s Rest, to Lily, a frog witch. All in all, these designs, alongside the wider monster designs, are really fantastic and strike a nice balance between identifiable and unique.
I Choose You!
You can normally guess what monsters will fit what role based on their design. A monster with a giant cookpot? Most likely a healer. A fast wolf with two heads? Attacker for definite. A giant interdimensional crab? Besides being really cool, it’s also a tank.
That’s not to say you won’t get lost in the game, as there is a lot of jargon to learn. From attack types to traits and abilities, most things have a slightly altered description to a normal RPG. While you do have the classics of poison and burn, you also have weakness, age, terror, power, temporary power, aura, sidekick, and more.
There’s not even traditional EXP, with the monsters instead being given a ‘worthiness’ score. This is eventually explained in game via a pretty deep story which is reminiscent of Hades, but to begin with, I’d try and just learn what you can and get a feel for the rest via the gameplay.
That’s not to say you won’t get lost in the game, as there is a lot of jargon to learn.
This isn’t to say that the game should stick to the tried and tested statuses and abilities. I applaud it for trying new things, and you do eventually get the hang of the layered mechanics. But be careful not to get overwhelmed at the beginning.
There are some pretty good tooltips which can be enabled, but they only show two tips at once, so you’re sometimes still lost if there’s a particularly complicated attack.
Getting A Feel For It
A benefit from the Roguelite system then, is that you’ll be repeating the same few areas again and again, giving you plenty of time to get a feel for the deep systems and synergies.
Make sure to battle all the monsters you can in the first few levels as the difficulty curve is quite steep, and you’ll need all the level-ups you can get before you reach the second area.
The closest game I’ve played to this would be something like Slay The Spire, where if you get the right synergies, then a turn can look amazing, with animations playing and stats increasing everywhere.
Now, also similar to games like Slay The Spire, is the fact that if you get your set-up wrong early on, then there’s not a huge amount you can do about it.
As the game is fully based on turn-based mechanics, there’s no place for your own skill level to rebalance the scales compared to a game like Dead Cells or Hades. I found myself quickly stuck on the final boss of the second zone, with the game progressing pretty smoothly until this blockage, whereby suddenly, team make-up becomes very important.
…if you get the right synergies, then a turn can look amazing.
This also means that the meta upgrades that you get in Pilgrim’s Rest are really important, and while it could be said that the game is slightly gated in the fact that I think you’d be very hard-pressed to beat a run in the first 5 tries, at least Pilgrim’s Rest is a nice place to travel through and unlock upgrades.
Some Deep Thoughts
Back to the story now, and it’s got a surprisingly deep point to it. As soon as I saw the ‘worthiness’ replacing EXP, I was given a feeling of Undertale, in that I was expecting something deeper.
And I was right. Not to go too much into spoiler territory, but there are opposing viewpoints from the Aethermancers and Monsterkin that you meet about who’s worthy and who’s not, and how this can be decided. There are also cults and the fact that Siriux seems to have been doing this for a long, long time, that I can’t wait to explore more.
I was given a feeling of Undertale, in that I was expecting something deeper. And I was right.
It’s not quite at the level of Hades with its presentation, being sans voice acting and with some lines already starting to repeat after 10 hours, but I’m certainly more engrossed in the story than I originally thought I would be. All the main players have bits of character development which made me attached to them all.
You advance the story in a similar way to Hades, by speaking to NPCs during your runs and at rest spots, with the story progressing after each run. Or at least it should, but there’s currently a bug whereby, if you save and exit at Pilgrim’s Rest, you can grind through story events.
Graphics And Music
Aethermancer looks absolutely phenomenal. I’ve already mentioned the excellent monster and character designs, but the rest of the world is just as well-made, with colours that pop and a pixel art that is just begging to be seen on an OLED screen.
My favourite detail is the fact that as you run past lights and candles, they turn on, bathing the area in a soft glow, firstly giving you an idea of where you’ve been, as well as making you feel like you’re powerful, affecting the world around you.
It is a shame that only the first monster follows you and there’s no way to amend this except for removing the first monster from your party. I’d love it if you had a full trail of monsters following you, all with their own animations, or if you could turn them off to make the room slightly less cluttered.
The music and sound effects are lovely as well, being atmospheric for each zone you enter, as well as appropriately punchy for the attacks. All we need now is some voice acting, and the game will be good to go in terms of general presentation, I think.
Some Imperfections
That’s not to say the UI is perfect though. It’s a bit random about what it wants to present at any time, with you not being able to see all the monsters you could swap out a new monster with easily, even though you can see the new monsters’ full stats, for example.
You also can’t see how much gold or Aether Crystals you have when looking to exchange them either, leaving you to have to exit and see the totals in the main UI and then remember.
Furthermore, every move that the Aethermancer has while running around is ‘void-something’. This can cause confusion as I forgot what the difference was between a Void Parry, Void Jump, and a Void Blitz.
Personally, I’d call them all something slightly different to help with the differentiation, and then combine them all as ‘Void Abilities’ at the top of the hierarchy.
Keep an eye on your monster souls, which are used for everything from summoning new monsters to increasing your monsters’ HP, as you can quickly go from not needing them to really needing them fast.
There’s also the beginning of a system that plays with the land, whereby you can break more poise on an enemy if you have the higher ground, but it ultimately falls flat.
There’s no way to lure enemies to higher ground, or make more of it, so it’s more a ‘nice to have if it’s there’ than a strategic maneuver.
At the end of the day though, each time I was preparing to write this preview, I’d get sucked into another run, such is the way with all the best Roguelites.
I played the entire game on my Steam Deck, and it runs very well, with the only issue of note being that you will need to tap some of the icons on the screen to read them as they can’t be accessed via the controller.
Closing Comments:
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Aethermancer. While it does run into similar issues of other Roguelites which don’t allow for the player’s own skill to compensate for a bad hand being dealt in terms of abilities, I felt compelled to start another run as soon as I lost. With no rage-quitting in sight, and plenty of scope for the game to grow in Early Access, this is sure to be a Rogue-ite which I keep track of.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
