Towers of Aghasba

The first sapling I planted died. Nothing dramatic, no failure text, no penalty. I stuck it on a chalk-dry cliff ledge because the view was good, wandered off, came back, and the ground around it was exactly as bare as I had left it. Meanwhile the half-dozen I had shoved into the valley floor without thinking had pushed a fuzz of green across a hundred meters of dead ground and pulled in a herd of long-legged creatures that simply had not existed there the day before. That was the moment Towers of Aghasba clicked for me, and also the moment I understood that the game cares far less about my plans than about my patience. The loop underneath all of it is genuinely uncommon. You spread life across a stripped island by seeding plants, those plants thicken into biomes, the biomes attract creature populations, and the creatures become a renewable source of the materials you need. Those materials feed settlement construction, settlements unlock better tools and structures, and better tools let you climb higher and glide further into terrain you could not previously reach, where you start the cycle again. Traversal is stamina-gated climbing and gliding, so the island doubles as a slow-unlocking puzzle box. Nothing here is on a timer and almost nothing punishes you. Dreamlit released it into Early Access in November 2024, and the systems have the honest, half-finished feel that implies. What works is the feedback. Watching a valley you personally re-seeded fill with animals over several sessions is a payoff most survival crafters never attempt, let alone land, and the art direction sells it: enormous silhouettes, painterly skies, a sense of scale that makes climbing something feel worth the stamina bar. Building is unfussy and forgiving. Online co-op is the best way to play it, because splitting the labor (one of you gathering, one of you laying out a settlement) turns a slog into a shared project, and a friend's building instincts will not match yours in ways that are usually delightful. If you want a game to potter around in for an hour at a time with a podcast on, this does that better than most. What does not work is most of the RPG part, and I say that as the person on this team who will happily re-read a dialogue tree for the third time to catch a foreshadowed line. There are no meaningful conversation choices, no faction reactivity worth tracking, no character arc that pays off any of the setup. Combat exists, it is functional, and I never once thought about it after the encounter ended. There is no build to theorycraft, no stat spread to argue about, no class identity past hour ten. The quest design leans hard on fetch structures dressed in ecological language, and the resource grind behind midgame construction is the kind of padded ask that made me put the controller down twice. The 68 percent Mixed rating on Steam across two thousand reviews reads exactly right to me: people who wanted a gardening sim adore it, people who came for an adventure RPG bounced off the tedium and the Early Access rough edges, which include performance dips, unfinished progression threads, and systems that are clearly still being wired together. So be honest with yourself about which of those two people you are. If your ideal evening is deciding where a grove goes and coming back later to see what moved in, this island will hold you for a long time and it is only getting more complete. If you are the type who opens a wiki to plan a respec before the tutorial ends, there is nothing here for you to chew on, and no amount of pretty vistas will change that. I like it, cautiously, the way you like a friend's ambitious half-built house. I also would not blame anyone for waiting a few patches before moving in.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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