Aery - Broken Memories

I keep a mental shelf for games that do one thing with sincerity and not much else, and Aery - Broken Memories lands squarely on it. EpiXR's premise is quietly ambitious: you pilot a small bird through 15 levels that represent the fractured subconscious of a coma patient, collecting memory shards to piece together who this person is. No combat, no timers, no fail states beyond the reset mechanic triggered when you fly outside the level boundaries. On paper, that sounds like meditative genius. In practice, it is a mild, occasionally pretty, frequently frustrating short-form experience that requires a very specific mood to land properly. The core loop is simple to a fault. Each level asks you to sweep through a surreal environment, hunt down scattered memory shards, and listen to brief narrated lines that sketch the character's inner life. The environments do show imagination: a pirate cove of shipwrecks and palm beaches sits next to a futuristic miniature city, and a snow-capped peak dotted with giant dog statues is genuinely strange in a likeable way. The hazy synth-heavy soundtrack adds real warmth to these spaces when it first kicks in. The problem is that the music loops across levels rather than assigning a unique track to each area, which gradually flattens the sense of discovery. Worse, the background music occasionally bleeds over the narrated lines that are supposed to be the emotional payoff, so the story the game is trying to tell gets muffled at the exact moment it matters. The controls are bare-bones third-person flight, responsive enough on PC, though the shard placement in some levels swings between obvious and genuinely wearisome to locate. The reset mechanic, which kicks you back a meaningful distance when you stray out of bounds, is the single biggest design irritant. In a game aiming for flow-state relaxation, getting snapped back repeatedly is a pacing killer. Compared to Flower or Abzu, the two obvious genre references, Broken Memories lacks the polish that makes those titles feel intentional rather than accidental. Who is this actually for? Stress-decompression players who want something to run in 20-minute chunks, achievement hunters looking for a low-friction checklist (the game has Steam achievements), and anyone already invested in the Aery franchise who wants more context on EpiXR's recurring flight format. Strategy fans like me have zero business expecting systems depth here, and that is fine. The game does not advertise any. What it does advertise, a genuinely calm flying experience with a light emotional narrative across 15 atmospheric levels, it delivers imperfectly but earnestly. The roughness is real, the vision behind it is real too.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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