I'll admit to never playing either of AER's most obvious core influences - Journey and Skyward Sword - but I know enough about them to see how Forgotten Key intended to meld the wonderment of flight with the exploration of an uncanny, not-too-large world of which you know nothing beyond what you can find. You play a young woman gifted with the power of flight as a bird avatar, exploring a world of broken islands in the sky on a tidy, 2-hour spiritual pilgrimage through what is left of the Earth.
Largely, I think this conceptual framework is established successfully and even with the embellished influences, AER works in the moment, for the most part. Unfortunately, it's a game that is flimsier in the hours of consideration following its conclusion. A majority of the game's content is spent inside flightless temples, solving puzzles that typically amount to "interact with the glowing thing." There is a flow to these places, but it's hardly satisfying to solve the challenges before you. The dissonance of trudging through dark tunnels and hitting buttons in a game that offers an unparalleled freedom of flight is not lost on me.
So much of the power of the spectacle in AER is derived from the scope and the silence of the pilgrimage. It is from this perspective that the game's verbosity turns from a nuisance to a factor working against the experience. Not only are there spirit animals that guide you along the journey, but dozens of pages of banal lore to find scattered throughout the landscape as the primary reward for exploration. Your trusty lantern allows you to see ghostly 'stills' of humans from the past, which can be powerful when not adorned with unnecessary and diegetically confusing text bubbles. Finally, in contrast with the solitude of the pilgrimage, AER also tries to comfort you with not only a mentor character but also a small family to distract yourself with near the last bastion of civilization in the southern islands. Their presence is charming and warm, but the game's achievement system indicates that it expects the player to make frequent trips back to them, even going way out of their way to do so, to check in, read their insight, or progress their miniature 'plotline.' There is simply too much being told to the player, and this is frustrating when the game is already displaying competence in powerful wordless revelations when Auk is out on her expeditions. In this way, AER almost didn't take enough from Journey - its silence and ambiguity would have been far more affecting.
BONUS THOUGHTS:
I once watched a scathing review of ABZU wherein the reviewer, MatthewMatosis, claimed it was so overwhelmingly similar to its spiritual predecessor, Journey, that it ultimately held no firm reason for existing at all. I understand the crux of the argument, but was never wholly convinced by it - I have not played ABZU, but even if the pacing, gameplay loop, and world structure are largely mirrored, the story and setting are so vastly different, and the mechanisms of exploration so dissimilar, that I can't follow through on the argument. Inspiration is one thing, a group of workers from one project leaving a studio to create a new project largely built from the original can rightfully raise eyebrows. But that's still an entirely new world being created for the player. Even if the experience fails, to call it unworthy of existence feels cruel.
I can only imagine how dismissive Matthew must be of AER, a game not built by former thatgamecompany employees, but instead people who wish they were. Does the distance from the design of the original Journey make this more earnest inspiration, or even more egregious?
Largely, I think this conceptual framework is established successfully and even with the embellished influences, AER works in the moment, for the most part. Unfortunately, it's a game that is flimsier in the hours of consideration following its conclusion. A majority of the game's content is spent inside flightless temples, solving puzzles that typically amount to "interact with the glowing thing." There is a flow to these places, but it's hardly satisfying to solve the challenges before you. The dissonance of trudging through dark tunnels and hitting buttons in a game that offers an unparalleled freedom of flight is not lost on me.
So much of the power of the spectacle in AER is derived from the scope and the silence of the pilgrimage. It is from this perspective that the game's verbosity turns from a nuisance to a factor working against the experience. Not only are there spirit animals that guide you along the journey, but dozens of pages of banal lore to find scattered throughout the landscape as the primary reward for exploration. Your trusty lantern allows you to see ghostly 'stills' of humans from the past, which can be powerful when not adorned with unnecessary and diegetically confusing text bubbles. Finally, in contrast with the solitude of the pilgrimage, AER also tries to comfort you with not only a mentor character but also a small family to distract yourself with near the last bastion of civilization in the southern islands. Their presence is charming and warm, but the game's achievement system indicates that it expects the player to make frequent trips back to them, even going way out of their way to do so, to check in, read their insight, or progress their miniature 'plotline.' There is simply too much being told to the player, and this is frustrating when the game is already displaying competence in powerful wordless revelations when Auk is out on her expeditions. In this way, AER almost didn't take enough from Journey - its silence and ambiguity would have been far more affecting.
BONUS THOUGHTS:
I once watched a scathing review of ABZU wherein the reviewer, MatthewMatosis, claimed it was so overwhelmingly similar to its spiritual predecessor, Journey, that it ultimately held no firm reason for existing at all. I understand the crux of the argument, but was never wholly convinced by it - I have not played ABZU, but even if the pacing, gameplay loop, and world structure are largely mirrored, the story and setting are so vastly different, and the mechanisms of exploration so dissimilar, that I can't follow through on the argument. Inspiration is one thing, a group of workers from one project leaving a studio to create a new project largely built from the original can rightfully raise eyebrows. But that's still an entirely new world being created for the player. Even if the experience fails, to call it unworthy of existence feels cruel.
I can only imagine how dismissive Matthew must be of AER, a game not built by former thatgamecompany employees, but instead people who wish they were. Does the distance from the design of the original Journey make this more earnest inspiration, or even more egregious?