AER Memories of Old sure is a game that wants to be up there with Journey, ABZU, The Pathless, Sword of the Sea which are all by Giant Squid, and even RiME by Tequila Works. It really does want to be up there with those fantastic titles but it just does not have the quality in the story telling nor the gameplay to even reach the bottom of the list.
This review will be a bit different layout wise from all of my previous.
The good: visually it’s fine, it’s trying very VERY hard to mimic all of the games listed above but.. it never quite got there but it’s still different. The flying mechanic is kinda cool but it has it’s many problems with I’ll list later. The music is great and when you no longer hear any background music you know something is going on and it sets an odd atmosphere that is quite a shift from the, quire frankly, Tycho style of music (I have to wonder who did their OST because it really does sound like Tycho). The many different islands are kinda cool, once you start visiting islands further up and suddenly you get massive seasonal changes is kind of sudden, you go from Autumn sort of environments and Spring to frozen tundra and snow mountain peaks in just a few minutes. The lighting is pretty good too, as there are a lot of sources, it’s not the best and it’s quite limited but for what it is, it’s pretty good environmental lighting effects. The length is at least about the right amount of time for this type of game, even then though it still feels too long but again later in the review.
The negatives: The story is just bland and generic, great catastrophe, gods and demi-gods that are betrayed by the evil humans or forgotten blah blah, it’s all so transparent and bog standard. Humans bad, greed bad, humans are the reason why the world is now just a couple of airborne islands that are somehow floating (wonder where they got THAT idea.. Bastion). The ending, which has been universally panned, is such an abrupt stop that I thought I did something wrong or missed something to get this ending, nope. The devs even said that they left it open to interpretation, basically think of how the Sopranos ended, that’s this game’s “ending”. To me this screams “the devs were arguing too much and couldn’t come to a consensus thus they just left it “open ended” in order to not offend and not have to do anymore story boarding and developing”. The rest of the story beats are just randomized because there’s no set order to find the locations of the next story beat, you can go to the top of the map right at the start of the game. All of the lore is so scattered, again to further pad the gameplay time and it ruins what limited story that AER has! If it was a coherent story, with set parts that you went to in order it would have been better at the very least it would have been more cohesive. Instead you end up going to random locations on the map and randomly finding a lore drop or an “event of the past” that you didn’t see or missed or went past because the game is completely open ended, which is a detriment to whatever limited story that this game has to follow.
The way that you navigate around the game is.. fine but the entire flight system, which you do over 60% of the entire gameplay time on, is horrible. In bird form you can’t slow down fast, if you want to land you can’t just transform back into your human form because your momentum carries you MILES away from your intended stop. The only sure fire way to actually stop, and even that is not a guarantee, is to NOSE DIVE INTO THE GROUND! You have air breaks for directions to make turns “easier” but your momentum carries you far too much, it’s like the devs didn’t think that the player would want to land ever because the air breaks do almost nothing to slow you down so that you can just land gradually. The map navigation isn’t great, again we had to go to “floating islands” like it was some totally original idea not totally already done to death by better developers. I honestly think that they did this in order to further artificially inflate the gameplay time. If it was just one big island my total gameplay time would be cut in half at the very least, again gameplay padding.
If you thought the flying was bad, wait until you have to do the game’s really poor excuses for jumping puzzles. The jumping in this game, and even the basic running/walking movement, is just bad, I will not sugar coat it, it controls like crap. I played with a controller so there was zero excuses as to why it felt that way, I would apply a small amount of pressure to go forward with that small amount of pressure you’re in full run animation (which looks bad by the way animation wise). There is no in between speeds, there is either barely moving by just brushing a human hair over the control stick or you’re full run, that’s it. This make jumping navigation difficult in a totally avoidable way, had the devs even playtested the game and puzzles. There is no shadow under your character, Nintendo back 1996 had a better understanding of what the player needs to see in order to judge distance. This game has zero body references, either when your flying or you’re walking on the ground, you have no self shadow and I don’t know why it was omitted, even a dark spot would have helped but no the devs were lazy and apparently adding that was too much effort.
So many bizarre design choices put in or neglected to put into this game that just scream “we’re not actually game developers, this was some kind of art project” or something. Things omitted that any past or present customer would assume was a given addition to any sort of game just ended up being removed or left out of AER entirely for seemingly no real reason. If it wasn’t for the fact that the story beats are spread out across this open world type game and if there was an actual coherent narrative and story I would say that the game would have been fine to good. Instead it just felt like I was going all over the place with no real direction because everything is just so spread out in order to inflate the gameplay time. Visually it’s fine but it doesn’t hold a candle to any of the titles that I mentioned in the first paragraph but the lack of shadows for your player character and shaders on things like the land and plants really makes the game feel flat and bland. If you want to try it, you can literally beat the game in less than 2 hours if you’re fast enough, I decided to explore. If you can get it on deep discount, and want to have an okay experience exploring this bizarrely out of sync “story”, then get it, otherwise, get any of the titles that I listed at the beginning and ignore that this game even tries to exist in the same realm as those games.
