Jonjo Maudsley

With AER, I got the sense somebody made a proof of concept, then decided to release it as a full game. It is undeniably a finished product: the graphics are good, the environment is complete, the story is all there, I only encountered one or two glitches. But at the same time, it is also undeniably very basic. Too basic, in fact. The whole game takes about 2 hours to complete. The world, while expansive, is empty, making any desire for exploration redundant. The pieces of a great story are all there, but the lack of any actual characters (even the heroine is, literally, a faceless entity) makes it hard to piece all the elements together. The worst thing is the gameplay, which is practically nonexistent. The whole game relies on just three commands: jump, turn into bird and take out lantern. The half-a-dozen (if that many) dungeons are completed by making simple jumps and pressing switches. At the end, the final boss is beaten without any buttons needing to be pushed. Whereupon the game ends abruptly leaving the story (which may have been the only thing holding my attention) unresolved. It is a neat little game and I would love to see it expanded into a full title, with actual combat, puzzles and dialogue-driven story. But as it stands I can't recommend this game to anyone except the most casual and aesthetically-obsessed gamers.