AereA

I wanted to love AereA more than it would let me. The concept is one of those rare ones that feels genuinely inspired: a top-down isometric action RPG where every weapon, every enemy, every boss is stitched together from classical instruments. The Cello-Knight swings his bow like a blade. The Trumpet-Gunner blasts brass projectiles across colour-soaked floating islands. Boss creatures fuse animals with instruments - a piano-scaled cobra here, a percussion-armoured mammoth there - and each boss fight scores its own music around the instrument you are hunting. That detail alone, the way the soundtrack rebuilds itself to incorporate each Primordial Instrument as the fight progresses, is the kind of handcraft I rarely see acknowledged in critical coverage of this game. Composer Deon van Heerden, who also worked on Broforce, delivers a score that I would genuinely listen to away from the game. That is not a small thing. The problem is the hour after the first hour. AereA runs on a Diablo-lite loop - choose one of four heroes, drop into randomly shuffled island maps, kill enemies to unlock gated doors, solve switch puzzles, find the boss stage, repeat across three explorable islands. The four classes offer paper-thin distinction in practice: Wolff the Harp-Archer, Jules the Lute-Mage, and Claude the Trumpet-Gunner all resolve as ranged characters with slight flavour differences, while Jacques the Cello-Knight functions as a melee tank who uses his cello as a shield. The dual leveling system - one track for character stats, one for instrument upgrades unlocked via Music Sheets - sounds interesting on paper, but the game breaks its own economy almost immediately. By the mid-point, enemies deal negligible damage and bosses fold in a few hits regardless of your stat investment, rendering the entire upgrade loop vestigial. The quest structure does not help. The majority of objectives amount to variations on go here, kill this many of that enemy, find the exit - looping back through areas you have already cleared, with all locked doors reset and puzzles requiring re-solving on death or revisit. There are glitches that have been partially addressed in post-launch patches, but the core pacing problems are design choices, not bugs. The four-item inventory cap, a shop that refuses to buy your unwanted loot, and fetch quests that send you across an eerily empty concert-hall hub to speak to the game's single other student - these accumulate into a texture of low ambition. Where AereA quietly earns back some goodwill is in local co-op. Drop-in-drop-out support for up to four players softens the repetition considerably - there is something genuinely fun about herding the four instrument-heroes through a dungeon together, even if the game does not scale challenge upward to match the added chaos. For a parent looking for something colourful, gentle, and beatable alongside a young child, AereA occupies a narrow but real niche. The art style is warm and fairytale-soft, difficulty is low enough that a younger player stays engaged without frustration, and the soundtrack remains the most accomplished thing in the room the entire time. If you are a solo player searching for a dungeon-crawler with mechanical teeth, this will not satisfy you. If music-driven gameplay is the specific draw, Crypt of the Necrodancer or Metronomicon will serve that itch with far more invention. AereA is a game that had genuine soul in its concept and genuine craft in its score, and then ran out of runway before the rest caught up.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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