The Rock Paper Shotgun CMS groaned like a harpooned whale when I fed the above game title into our database. I was tempted to shave away some punctuation for the benefit of whoever writes about this game next, but then I remembered that I hate everybody here as I do hell, all Montagues, and thee. Anyway, what a title. It’s like Type Moon and Kingdom Hearts fell into a cyberpunk snakepit.
I don’t even know what half of those typographical characters are called. They appear malevolently polarised, pushing other letters away from them. They seem… primordial somehow. Our distant ancestors used to hack brackets like those into the walls of caverns, when they wished to add inessential tips about flint storage to paintings of hunters getting tusked by mammoths.
The game beneath is appropriately arcane. Devised by The Dark Union – whose official website resounds with monastic chanting and has an About page containing doomy philosophical maxims about bees – it’s a third-person “story-driven stealth action immersive sim” in which you play a holy alchemist, Auronika Cortez.
Her goal is to topple the rulers of a rainy, “medieval-industrial” world of tunnels and ramparts prowled by soldiers brandishing crystal rifles. Your principle weapon is your ability to fashion bits of trash into potions and bombs. The bombs are exceedingly explosive. This is not one of those shooters where you hop back a few paces back after lobbing some C4 at a cave-in. You park your butt behind a nice thick wall.
The demo on Steam leaves me mixed about the cleverness of the immersive simming – I spent a lot of time crouching and running away from guttural guard chatter – but I love the A.E.S.T.H.E.T.I.C. This includes what are probably very strenously observed “technical limitations”. The intro cinematic yearns for an era in FMV when developers might luxuriate in the spectacle of individual hair follicles but had yet to animate them. In-game, I was pleased to find that I could back into a corner and poke the camera through my character’s skull, to see her pasted-on face from the inside. Kids these days will never understand such delights.
Your health gauge is a clump of glaring cybermetal, screwed into the bottom right corner, while item and status notifications clatter down a feed on the left. The setting is a sparsely populated, palpably inhuman undulation of brute grey boxes and pyramids. And then there’s the splendid crafting screen. It sees you assembling components inside a wavering ball of energy on a curved wireframe, then drawing a glyph. An aetherial circle plus metal and plastic nets you some bomb components. Add the components to more metal and plastic plus a curvy star glyph, and you’ll produce a “basic bomb” capable of dusting a cathedral.
It’s tentatively slated to release next year. The premise and emphasis on freeform building destruction here remind me of Red Faction Guerrilla, though being the work of a much smaller team, this isn’t nearly as granular in its devastation. I doubt it needs to be that granular, and it’s not just a sneaky teardown sim, in any case: the Steam page promises a “story of resistance, redemption, and the price of freedom as Auronika must navigate between her heavenly mandate and the brutal realities of uprising.”
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Author: 360 Technology Group
