Aethermancer Demo Review

Aethermancer's demo is hands-down the perfect example of how to get your game into the hands of an audience.

My first exposure to this turn-based roguelike was seeing it in a post on the offbrand games BlueSky account, and just the art style was enough to get my attention. Since then, I've spent about 20 hours exploring the Void, trying out new team compositions to wildly satiate myself until the game's eventual release. The game begins with an ominous lore drop that establishes the story that unravels as you talk to NPCs. A dark entity known as the Void has been swallowing up the land, and it's your mission to stop that. Following this, the game begins, and the player gets control of Siriux, an Aethermancer.

Aethermancer cements itself as a standout in the genre, combining a clean, detailed pixelart with stellar sound design, enticing gameplay, and a very 'numbers-go-up' gameplay loop that never gets boring.

To Catch A Monster

The demo starts the player off with the two monsters to choose from that drastically alter the initial experience: Jotunn, the blue, bulky, frost giant Minotaur, or Cherufe, the red, beastly, magma monster. There are 17 different monsters to encounter, each with their own distinct designs and utilities. Capturing monsters requires them to be staggered after breaking their poise, dealing a number of hits of a corresponding elemental attack. Once a monster is staggered, you'll be able to use a Memento, a doll shaped keychain to absorb the creature's essence and use it in subsequent runs. While the monster won't join your team immediately, it may be available at the Monster Shrines that are available at the beginning of each floor, spawning a number of monsters to choose from according to how many Monster Souls, an item you can find randomly or purchase from an NPC, are in your inventory.

As a system, I quite enjoy this. My earlier runs were mostly focused on collecting all the monsters, and not once did it feel like it distracted from my natural progression. Focusing the capture mechanic on the main way to get a leg up in battle is very intuitive and offers players an easy chance to fill out their roster for future runs.

What Makes A Monster

Aethermancer handles creature types in a very unique way. Rather than giving creatures an elemental type for a rock-paper-scissors type chart, Elements and Types operate in their own ways.

Each monster has two Elements, and doing a basic attack generates one Aether for each Element to use as a resource for other Actions. Elements consist of Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind, along with a fifth Wild element that can be a substitute for any of the main four. Generally, Fire is about dealing damage and being aggressive, Earth is about providing debuffs, Water is about healing and regenerating health, and Wind is about providing buffs to your team.

Types are based on a monster’s utility, and each monster has three Types. Each of these types, along with the monster's Elements, affect the kinds of moves a monster can learn and what effects they have in battle. What I enjoy about these is how Aethermancer takes typical status conditions and alters them into Types to fit the structure of the game. Rather than being inflicted with a status condition once, multiple stacks of a status can be inflicted in one turn and will go down as the battle goes on. What I found most compelling was Age, a type that focuses purely on turn count. As each turn passes, a monster "ages," and meeting certain turn numbers triggers specific effects. What makes this mechanic even more interesting is that players can't stack multiple Age counters in one turn (except for a short list of moves that raise the number by one or two) and instead have to rely on the natural progression of the battle. Age can also be given to other monsters, and once they have it, it can never decrease or go away for that battle. moi rai, Aethermancer's developers, found a way to make turns passing into a compelling mechanic in their roguelike, and I can't help but applaud that.

Other traditional RPG status effects like burn and poison have found their unique footing in this game. Both follow the same rule of being able to have multiple stacks at a time but have different default triggers: Burn is triggered when a monster spends Aether, gets staggered, or gets its Aether stolen/purged. Poison triggers at the beginning of each turn, and both effects do damage equal to the amount of stacks that are on a monster as opposed to doing a specific percentage of health.

Aethermancer's Types are melded in a way that fit the roguelike structure of this game perfectly, allowing players to either lean into one Type to focus their team around, or cover their bases with multiple Types.

Battles In The Void

Aethermancer's combat makes every turn feel like a new stack of dominos falling over. Each monster starts with a Signature Trait that relates to one of its three types and a move that triggers said Trait. From here, level-up moves will correspond to that monster's Element and the Types available in the party, creating a domino effect that feeds into the Traits. Let's use this team as an example:

I started my run with the stone titan, Gargoyle. Its Earthen Striker ability and Mineralize action work in sync to grant Gargoyle Sidekick to attack multiple times in one turn, as well as granting itself and the whole party shields to block damage. Wyrmling comes in to play support, gaining an attack boost whenever it heals its allies, and it can pass that buff onto its allies by attacking. Star Spawn fills in the last slot as the main attacker of the group, generating Wild Aether and dealing massive spread damage.

While this team wasn't structured around shared Types, it found its synergy in other abilities and ended up being a well-oiled machine. Gargoyle could now offer its allies an attack boost so long as it had Sidekick, and it could apply that skill to itself for virtually nothing thanks to Charge Up's low cost. Star Spawn's Outlast Trait gives itself Hit Points on every turn, and Aether Breath attacks the entire enemy team after 20 Aether has been spent on my end. Wyrmling is a healing master - it's Synchronous Healing heals allies for every five Aether generated of the same element, and it can rid the entire party's Corruption in small doses by combining Volcanic Essence and Cleans Corruption. While this team doesn't have a lot of overt synergies in their Traits, they each allow each other to survive and activate their own abilities over and over again, so each battle felt like things were snowballing.

These work in tandem with the various Equipment items that can be found throughout a run that do things like increase health or boost critical hit chances. With all these moving parts, Aethermancer quickly begins to feel you're finding all the right parts to a well-oiled machine that will never be the same between runs.

Battles aren't just back and forth matches though. Whenever an enemy attacks an ally creature it leaves small amounts of Corruption, lowering their total health for the rest of the run until they get it healed at the rest areas between biomes or some random locations during a run. While monsters can get healed past this for their full original hit points, they'll start the battle with their reduced health.

After a battle is complete, monsters gain one experience point, and every level-up gives players the chance to pick one of three potential Actions or Traits to give their monster. While these levels reset at the end of each run (or if you re-summon a monster after it dies in battle during that run), Aethermancer introduces Worthiness as a means of providing monsters with a permanent buff for future runs. Each monster gains Worthiness for completing specific actions during battle, and upon gaining enough points they unlock things like more health in future runs.

Exploring The Void

Aethermancer's demo currently has two biomes that players will travel in, with four levels and one boss fight per biome. The first is Pilgrimage Path, a dark forest sitting at the edge of the Void's corruption. The second is the Forbidden Fortress, further into the Void and home to the Cult of Void, a mysterious group that doesn't make any appearances in the demo outside of being mentioned by NPCs. While both areas have different visual elements, I didn't find traversing them any different comparatively. What does stand out about the biomes is the pool of monsters available and how they fit thematically.

With Pilgrimage Path being a forest, all of the monsters in the area fit into that aesthetic. Orthrus is a two-headed hound, Cockatrice is a big bird, Wolpertinger is a mashup of various creatures. This area also fits as the beginning area of an RPG with monsters like Ooze and Wyrmling, a slime monster and a baby dragon. The Champion Monster, Warden, perfectly epitomizes that vibe of Pilgrimage Path. It bears an animal head and a warrior's body, carved out of wood and stone and emanating some sort of magic.

The Forbidden Fortress's monsters contrast this quite well. Nosferatu crawls across the castle floors in a genuinely unsettling manner. Other monsters like Grimoire, Mephisto, and Shambler speak to the lore notes about the Cult of Void, tapping into Wild Aether or just looking outright strange. The Champion Monster in this area is Star Spawn, an eldritch-inspired monster with tentacles and an innate ability to tap into Wild Aether. Both biomes make it a point to stand out with the monsters available to capture, as well as the Traits and Actions players will have to go against to delve further into the Void.

Like every rougelike, the end of a run sends players back to a hub world where they can snag some permanent upgrades. Pilgrim's Rest is a quiet town that hosts all the NPCs encountered on the journey through the Void. Minor NPCs can pop up in town after Siriux points them in the direction of Pilgrim's Rest, others will sell permanent upgrades and talk about their views on the Void, other NPCs, and the Aethermancers as a whole.

What works exceptionally well in this game is that none of the NPCs are human. There's Alioth, the only other Aethermancer in town, and it's through dialogue with him that we learn that Aethermancers are artificially created beings. Lily the Witch is a big frog, Myrne the Cook is some kind of bug or alien, Sir Tiberion never takes off his armor in front of the player. Each of these designs is unique in its own right, from Alioth's oversized hat to The Merchant's skull and robe. I enjoy how each of these NPCs feels different from one another and seemingly have their own opinions of one another.

So, What's Missing?

At the end of the day, this is still the demo of an unreleased game. So, what would I like to see come out with the final product?

To start, Aethermancer's tutorial could use a bit more polish before the final release. The amount of content in this game is huge and takes a few tries before really understanding the decision-making process. The screen is very busy, chock full of menus, text boxes, some mildly confusing wording, and a detailed background, all of which made it a bit more difficult to retain the information given to me on my first save file.

During combat, the amount of status effects and moves that trigger each other can be staggering, and battles quickly turned into opening up the Monster menu and asking myself "What did I do to make that happen when I thought it only did this thing?" A battle log would be very appreciated, offering players a resource to pull up with ease and understand their combos more innately in the future. It would also be a huge boon if players could pull up party information when picking which Equipment to give their monsters. There have been a few moments where I was torn on which monster should get which item, especially when it comes with a drawback like lowering monster health.

Between biomes is a one-room layer where players can heal their monsters' corruption. At the moment, this is the only room where players aren't stopped by a portal to further progress, and I ran through this room on accident at first. While I've never made that mistake again, I think that not separating this room with a portal to leave like every other level is a strange choice.

Completing a run introduces Heroic difficulty, and at the moment (version 0.1.2.11) the game doesn't detail the changes that are in Heroic.

Lastly, variable font sizes would be a major improvement considering how much text there is as well as considering any eventual Steam Deck verification.

Closing Thoughts

While Aethermancer doesn't have a set release date, I'm excited to check the game out when it comes out. With an already robust combat system, diverse monster selection, and gorgeous art and sound design, the demo offers players a ton of content to get a taste for the game and satiate themselves. Feel free to check the demo out on Steam here and follow its progress.

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