Aspire: Ina's Tale

released on Dec 17, 2021

Aspire: Ina's Tale is a 2D, adventure puzzle game. Set out on a fantastical adventure as Ina and take a journey of self-discovery against the backdrop of dazzling, mystical landscapes of The Tower. Experience her fear turn to conviction as she unravels her purpose in this world and embarks on a one-way path to freedom.


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Sights & Sounds
- The visuals are a little inconsistent. The background art is amazing and very interesting to look at with the angular crystals and shard-like architecture. The character and enemy designs are, in comparison, fairly simple-looking and generic
- The animation in this game is grim. It feels sluggish and looks awkward. You don't so much mantle ledges as you clumsily flop your way up them
- The score is probably the high point of this game. From the tinkling, austere keys in the game's main theme to the booming percussion of its boss themes, there's almost always something for your ears to latch onto, at least

Story & Vibes
- The overt narrative follows Ina, a magical priestess of some sort who finds herself waking up following an attack on the tower she's imprisoned in. You're trying to escape even though the tower itself is sorta opposed to that idea
- It appears to be a metaphorical, infer-your-own-meaning sort of tale about growth and awakening. There's even a dialogue option for you to choose what sort of figurative issue you're trying to run from. That decision unfortunately felt a little trite
- Overall, this game doesn't have a strong Identity or message. It couldn't even hone in on a central theme. When the game's answer take-home message is, "lol I dunno, what do YOU think I'm trying to say?", the whole experience feels cheap and wishy-washy

Playability & Replayability
- A weak story or bad vibes can usually be forgiven if a game has a fun gameplay loop, but Aspire: Ina's Tale doesn't get that quite right either. Don't get me wrong; the puzzles are competently designed and some were even quite clever. But it doesn't matter when the "platformer" half of the "puzzle platformer" nomen feels so awful to play
- Ina constantly feels like she's running underwater. Doing literally anything in this game feels sluggish and awful. I have no idea why she moves so slowly, but I constantly found myself grinding my Steam Deck's analog stick against the housing in an subconscious attempt to speed things up
- The sludgy movement becomes glaringly obvious when enduring chase sequences or completing puzzles requiring quick or precise timing. Things slow down even harder when you have to push blocks or wait for doors to open.
- I'm not going to be back for the achievements or collectibles. Seeing the credits roll was a bit of a relief

Overall Impressions & Performance
- Nice background art and a great soundtrack can't save this one. I've played very few platformers that made basic movement and environment navigation feel so awful
- Seeing as how the game is in no rush to get to where it's going, it won't tax your system too badly. It played well on the Steam Deck

Final Verdict
- 3.5/10. Even with perfectly snappy controls, this title would still feel a little generic. As it stands with the existing controls, calling the experience a chore would be charitable

I have a funny story , by funny I mean sad. I was literally nearly finished with the game when it glitched out and I could not finish it.
great design of everything though.

A fine puzzler. Sometimes unintuitive, but even I got through relatively unscathed so it can't be that bad.

I initially wanted to talk about the wishy-washy story, but now I'm not so sure. When is a world merely underexplained, and when does it invite the player to kit it out? It reminds me of Bastion's non-recurring ending: a venture into the unknown out of a mystical contraption, few characters and hints at something bigger. In Ina's case, I think they're trying to get on a more abstract plane too quickly while skipping over what's happening concretely. It's obviously not trying to be a huge worldbuilding effort, and in the scope of a nebulous Architect building a semi-living tower it does well enough, but I still cannot grasp what the purpose of it is. You get all the different puzzle pieces throughout and it's not like they don't fit together, but they're so far apart that you can't begin to tell where they do fit. But it might just be all preference.

At least it does have a relatively upbeat ending, which I appreciate.

Controls were kind of clucky, puzzles were tedious and a handful of bugs that caused me to back track. If you're curious about the story you're better off looking it up or watching a playthrough

I've seen in some other forums I visit occasionally over the years some people commenting on graphics in a way that frankly, perplexes me. Complaining that new games visuals are bad, or AAA graphics are awful. I grew up in the 80's with a ZX spectrum, everything now days looks fantastic to me. There are a certain set of gamers seemingly obsessed with screen resolution and hyper detail. Sure those things are nice, I love stunning looking games that are cutting edge but none of that matters if the art is bad or not of one vision. Art holds these games together and Aspire: Ina's Tale really emphasizes this because it's gorgeous.

It uses a very flat 2D style almost like it's been made with paper cut out to form the shapes and patterns. Through the titular Ina's journey you visit, dungeons, gardens and factories and each area is distinct from each other with a nice mixture of foreground and background elements. To bring this artistic cohesive vision together the soundtrack is wonderful. Using piano as it's main instrument but other pieces in different parts for a slow melancholic relaxing vibe through most the game but there are sections especially at the end where the tempo picks up matching the action perfectly. Aspire's overall presentation is stunning, at least to me.

Visual and Audio enjoyment aside the rest of the game is both simple and very short, but I don't mean that as an insult. This is the sort of game you can play over a weekend or in a day and any more than that it would wear out it's welcome frankly. The story to the game follows Ina, a young girl and priestess held in a mysterious tower she has to escape from. She will meet a limited cast of characters as she goes giving hints of what the overall story is actually about, it's a little ambiguous at the end exactly what was happening with quite a lot to read between the lines.

The gameplay is a fairly standard 2D puzzle platformer. It's very linear with it's puzzles being fairly simple manipulating blocks, lifts and moving objects to doors. Ina can manipulate spirits of different type, either energy, motion or mass to power, move or grow objects to travel to the next area. Each area has certain resources to do this as part of the puzzle. They are mostly intuitive puzzles that are quite clear what you need to do within a few seconds though I got stumped on two for a few minutes simply because I was overthinking them. I finished the game in about 3 hours with a checkpoint select to mop up the few trophies I missed but there is nothing else, very limited collectibles or reason to replay it.

I'm gonna be honest, I had a really nice time with this but you need to know what you're getting into when you start it. If you want a simple to play, short game that looks and sounds fantastic as a palette cleanser from bigger or more complicated titles than this is the perfect game for that.

+ The art and audio design are a delight.
+ Simple relaxing game.
+ Pleasant characters and narrative.