Aground

My first session with Aground lasted well past midnight because the opening lulled me into a false sense of familiarity. Wood off the ground, a hut, a pickaxe, some coal - nothing you haven't seen before. Then the game quietly lifts the curtain and reveals something far stranger and more ambitious than its muted pixel art suggests, and the next few hours feel less like a crafting loop and more like following a trail of breadcrumbs through a post-apocalyptic fairy tale set in space. At its core this is a 2D mining-and-crafting RPG with genuine RPG bones: experience, leveling up stamina and carrying capacity, NPC quest chains that teach you new systems, and a settlement that grows from a single hut into something resembling a civilization. The resource grind is real - chop trees, smelt ore, build a smelter, build a kitchen, kill animals to cook meals that restore stamina, repeat - but Aground layers narrative urgency onto that loop in a way that Terraria, for all its brilliance, never bothered to. You are not just building for the sake of building. You are trying to get your people back to the stars. The progression is largely linear, which some players will find constraining, but it also means the game always has a next objective waiting and almost never dumps you in a blank sandbox asking you to invent your own purpose. The big structural surprise, and one worth protecting if you go in fresh, is that mid-game the world forks. The science path takes you west, into a settlement of cyborg researchers called the Mirrows, patrol boats fueled by coal or refined oil, chainsaws, factories, and eventually a Mecha Wyrm you can evolve into a Mecha Dragon using a combination of tech parts and magic gems. The magic path takes you east, accessible only by taming and riding a living dragon, where you will find an alchemist, an elder dragon you can either ally with or accidentally antagonize, alter gems that transform captured creatures into familiars, and a witch who only appears after you change the time of day using a mysterious purple building. A third hybrid path weaves both together for what the community considers the true ending. These paths do not just change your gear loadout - they change who you talk to, which bosses you face, and whether the finale involves a frontal assault or an act of diplomatic deception against the alien faction known only as Them. For a game that starts with picking up sticks on a beach, that is a remarkable amount of tonal range. The honest caveats are worth naming. Combat is rudimentary to a fault - mostly holding a direction and swinging your current best weapon, with shields adding a thin layer of timing for tougher encounters like the Old One or the Wyrm Queen. The pixel art is intentional and low-key but some enemy sprites are genuinely hard to read at a glance. The magic path in particular offers less structured quest guidance than the science path, and players who need explicit direction will find themselves consulting the wiki more than they might like. Early boat travel between islands is slow. Manual saving via a bed or home structure can feel punishing on longer expeditions, though cloud saves and Steam Workshop mod support ease the rougher edges considerably. Online co-op on PC adds a fun layer if you can get a friend in, though the experience was built around solo play and shows it. What Aground gets right, and what keeps players returning for eighty-plus hour runs, is the rhythm of revelation. Every time the game looks like it has reached its ceiling, a new mechanic or location breaks it open again. That is rare in this genre, and rarer still from a two-person indie studio working over three years to ship something this quietly strange and generous.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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