Aerannis

My first hour with Aerannis felt like opening a handmade zine someone left on a bus: unusual, a little unpolished, impossible to put down. Solo developer ektomarch built a 2D stealth-action Metroidvania set in Plovdiv, a cyberpunk Bulgarian city where men have ceased to exist and a shapeshifting cabal quietly runs everything from the shadows. You play Ceyda Farhi, a trans woman and contract assassin, piecing together a conspiracy that grows stranger and darker with every completed job. The premise alone earns the game a seat at an interesting table. On the mechanical level, Aerannis mixes stealth missions and run-and-gun sections across an interconnected world. Ceyda crawls through vents, throws noisemakers as distractions, grabs enemies from behind to use as hostages or human shields, and drops traps when things get complicated. Her energy pistol works like a Mega Man buster: small rapid shots or a slower charged blast, useful for boss encounters far more than corridor skirmishes. New traversal abilities arrive over the course of the game, including wall jumps and a dash, and a handful of enormous boss battles punctuate the mission structure in ways that genuinely surprise. The game sits at roughly six to eight hours depending on pace, and it offers two endings tied to how events unfold. Here is where honesty matters more than cheerleading. The stealth is the roughest part of the package. Some missions end the instant you are spotted, which sounds fair until you realise the visibility feedback is minimal: a color-coded globe tells you an enemy is near, but the actual line-of-sight geometry is murky enough to produce a lot of mission-restart frustration. The wall-jump controls push Ceyda away from surfaces in ways that feel counterintuitive, and stealth kills require a two-step grab-then-shoot sequence that can feel rushed and clumsy rather than surgical. The free-roaming world between missions has no map, and waypoints rely on landmarks you may not have seen yet. Community feedback on Steam sits at a mixed rating, and those criticisms are legitimate. What keeps Aerannis worth your time anyway is harder to quantify. The pixel art is genuinely vibrant, citing influences like Metroid Fusion and Pulseman in its clean, saturated color choices, and the world-building seeps through the backgrounds rather than the dialogue. Illuminati pyramids, security drones, factions with names like TERF Turf: the lore is dense, strange, and politically pointed without ever resolving cleanly into a single reading. The soundtrack, flagged consistently by community reviewers as a highlight, carries the mood of sci-fi noir with real craft. And the story's central question, whether someone society refuses to accept as fully human owes that society her protection, is the kind of thing a bigger-budget game would never risk asking. For a small-team game from 2015, Aerannis carries more genuine authorial intent than most of its genre contemporaries. If rough edges in stealth design break your patience, you will bounce off this within the first two missions. If you can extend the same generosity you would to an indie film that overshoots its technical reach, the conspiracy unraveling underneath is worth seeing through to one of its two endings.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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