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Monster capturing plus roguelite, turn-based battling is a combo that seems tailor-made for the current gaming landscape. With that much potential, it’s no surprise that the folks at moi rai games, developers of the popular indie hit Monster Sanctuary, would decide to bring their new game Aethermancer to Steam in an Early Access format. Luckily, the game debuts at an exceptionally playable place, and is teeming with taming goodness mixed with a deep, robust skill and gameplay loop that will benefit even more with some tinkering as the development cycle continues into their Early Access Roadmap. For now, let’s check out what’s good (and needs some work) when it comes to Aethermancer in its current state.
Tame and Take on Terastae's Terrors
You are an Aethermancer in the world of Terastae, and your skills as such allow you to tame and direct the growth and attacks of the monsters stuck in a cycle of death and rebirth. You’ll choose an initial soul-bonded monster, but the rest will have to be “caught” by you after breaking them down in battle. Since this is a roguelite, those monsters will eventually fall in battle and be lost permanently for that run. However, Aethermancer does a fantastic job of giving your monsters experience points that slowly level up holdover skills and abilities that make things a bit easier or more adaptable in future runs. The gameplay of Aethermancer revolves around exploring procedurally generated stages in a biome that lead to a boss fight, which, if you succeed, have you proceed to the next biome. While exploring, you and your rebirthed monsters, of which you can have a max of 3 with you, can come upon other enemy monsters to battle for skill points. After you gain a certain amount, you’ll level up, and each time you do you can choose from a set of skills that you select from to potentially use during combat. These skills spend “Aether” charges of certain element types to be used in battle. Your monsters (and yourself) can each use one per round, and so deciding the order of skill usage and figuring out how to best synergize these various energy expenses and benefits will determine how powerful you become, how much shield you generate, how many debuffs you can inflict on the enemy or absolve from yourself, and so on.
The depth of Aethermancer comes from the vast array of energies and skills that can be chosen from and combined to create a wealth of combat strategies. Preparation and strategy is the name of the game here, as some of the later enemies and bosses will require forethought on how to handle the seemingly insurmountable odds against you. The first time I encountered some of the later fights, I went through the classic roguelite feeling of, “How the heck do they expect me to beat this?!” But sure enough, after continuing to plug away at more runs and really pay attention to enemy weaknesses I could exploit for more effective damage (and damage mitigation) I started to see potential paths to success. Switching up my team of monsters, which you can eventually “soul-bond” with, allowing you to rebirth them early on in runs without having to recruit them in the field again, allowed me to see what types of skillsets I wanted to explore more. There are Tanks, Healers, Criticals, and Support types along with others that encourage you to try out what works for you. With this much customization within the combat, I’m sure there’s some sort of overpowered meta or combo that is unstoppable, but the balancing is done in such a good way that it wasn’t immediately apparent that there was one. I continued to find new ways to protect myself and my team as I did run after run, whether that was prioritizing shields, trying to take out enemies one by one, or whittling down health with poison stacks. Basically, you won’t feel shoehorned into doing things one way or almost ensuring your demise doing it any other way.
Continuing to Excel
So far, there are 3 biomes to explore through, each with their own special boss encounter at the end. In addition to the enemy monsters you run into, you’ll meet and befriend a host of NPCs with their own personalities and stories to tell. You can definitely tell that there’s a world of lore behind Aethermancer and its characters through the little chats you have with these inhabitants. Between runs, there’s a town you walk around and refresh in, and while there you can interact with some of these friendly faces that are now selling quality upgrades, skills, and other invaluable perks that help meta-progression overall. While you’re out on your runs, you’ll earn a currency that sticks around within and between runs, which can be spent at these vendors. What’s really intriguing is, say you’re on a not-so-great run through their enemy-filled world; within that run, you’re often given the option to choose upgraded skills, trinkets, or other upgrades, or you can just choose to get more of that permanent currency. This really made even trivial or doomed runs feel valuable. I got to experiment with new monsters or skill combos and continuously benefit through that currency or through giving permanent experience to my monsters. I love how good roguelites put value to your time playing the game, and tangible upgrades that help nudge you along without you even realizing it sometimes. Aethermancer does that very well.
Trying Times
However, I will say that while things are very exciting and surprising within the first few hours and many of the runs where you’re reaching new areas, the grind through the first area can become a bit trivial eventually. Runs are also very long, with the exploration part of the game feeling novel at first, but occasionally repetitive. No game can have an infinite amount of content, but somehow having a way to streamline some of those initial “first steps” that you have to do at the beginning of every run would be good, I believe. Reaching the later areas so that you can “capture” new monsters to use, with your limited capture abilities I might add, is a time-consuming venture, but one that can be supremely rewarding, considering you can then use that captured monster in future forays into the fray freely.
Beautiful and Beastly
One area that Aethermancer excels at is its visuals. Terastae is ripe with color and character, with the monsters having plenty of exceptional animation loops and quirks, including in how they attack. You won’t find one boring or expected pixel in the place, and no matter how many runs I did, I never stopped marveling at the creativity, passion, and feel the designers had for the world and monsters they crafted. Of course, as fans of animals here at GF, I would be wrong to not mention how much animals play a part in influencing the design of some of the creatures you can recruit for your team. Being able to start with a brutish, black and ice shard ridden bull-wark of a monster was a treat, and you’ll be hard-pressed to not find a few monsters you keep on your team. Plus, I didn’t feel like any were completely unusable skill-wise. So, if you really like the visuals on one, I still felt powerful, even if it took some leveling up and experimenting with what they did best in their role. Oh, and the NPCs are often very world-appropriate animal-based characters, or have fun traits that make them feel right at home in the unique environments.
Adventuring Audio
Audio-wise, Aethermancer is on the dramatic, orchestral side of the spectrum, with situation-appropriate tunes that are sort of town-visiting, dungeon-exploring vibe to them. They fit the worlds well and aren’t overbearing in any way. Just good, solid background music. Skills used in combat have well-intentioned and weighty sound effects added in, and there’re no out of place or missing sound indicators for menus, upgrades, or the like. It all sounds great together and glues the visuals and gameplay together nicely.
In Conclusion
Overall, Aethermancer is in a great place right out of the gate. There’s lots of monsters to acquire and upgrade, plenty of skills to experiment with, and the potential for so much more. The developers have already laid out an Early Access Roadmap, and have made improvements after release, too. The developer has now proven they know their craft well, and Aethermancer is a reflection of that growth.
