Aethus review

(backup copy of the Steam review)

tl;dr: Non-combat dungeon delver with a reasonably-enjoyable gameplay loop, good voice acting, and a mediocre plot. 5/7, but just barely on the edge of a 4/7.

Aethus (stylized as AETHUS in marketing materials, but I'm not going to do that) is your classic "screwed over by capitalism, so I set off into the wilderness to forge my own destiny" story. The plot has a few twists, but they are so cliché that it's barely worth mentioning them. The main gameplay is your standard mining dungeon crawler, though thankfully devoid of any combat/monsters. There's also some minor base-building elements.

The plot revolves around digging down into a mine that the protagonist's grandfather had previously owned/worked on and told said protagonist that it was very, very, VERY important. Yeah, we get it, granddad, you unearthed/created something morally reprehensible and you want us to dispose of it, but the protagonist will think it's some big treasure right up until she is explicitly told it's evil. The exact nature of this evil is not told to us or even hinted at until the 11th hour, and it's actually fairly unique, so it fails even when it succeeds.

One of the most egregious twists is that the "survivor" you find on the second floor of the dungeon is actually an AI. This is not a spoiler, because anyone with even a basic grasp of character stereotypes will guess the nature of the person as soon as they first contact you, but the game insists on pretending that it's a deep mystery right up until the end of the second floor (several hours, depending on your play efficiency). I actually felt a little insulted by how stupid the protagonist is.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is fairly fun if a bit repetitive. As a mining dungeon crawler, the majority of your time will be spent delving into the mine/dungeon, harvesting various resources, and picking up anything not nailed down too hard; then carting that all back up (possibly in several trips) to process and/or sell. Mining is accomplished by having your floating robot buddy repeatedly shoot mining nodes with his laser... that sounds a lot cooler than it actually is. Basically, you rapidly click (or hold down the button; thank you for accessibility options) a node until it bursts like a piñata and sprays its delicious rocks all over for you to run around and collect. Then you move a few meters along the path and do it again. And again. And again. And again. Yeah, it's repetitive, but also quite relaxing.

My only real problem with the gameplay loop is also my only real problem with the voice acting: whenever you run low on oxygen, or encounter a new collectible, or any of a number of other repeatable events in the mine, your robot buddy or the protagonist will pipe up with a several-seconds-long voice clip to inform you of this event. "Maeve, you're running low on oxygen. You should get back to shelter." or "I'm almost out, I should find somewhere safe." Every. Fucking. Time. And there's no option for reducing the length of these clips or even just risking death by turning only the repeatable voice clips off. So the common practice of listening to a podcast while engaging in a mindless-fun gameplay loop is frequently interrupted by the game grabbing your attention loudly.

But those voices are still nice to listen to. All four of the main voice actors are well-directed and well-recorded. Maeve and her robot buddy have Scottish accents, while the corpo-rat has an American accent and the AI has a British accent. Or maybe not, I'm bad at accent recognition. Whenever it's not repeatable voice clips, you can really feel the emotion of these characters. A+ casting, direction, recording, and mastering. Even the moment-to-moment writing is good. Too bad about the plot.

I don't really have anything interesting to say about the graphics, so I'll just go with: they're decent and functional. There won't be thinkpieces written about how this revolutionized aesthetics, but you also won't see any serious person dunking on them.

Finally, the base-building: it's fine. You can probably get creative with styling the buildings, placing down lots of decorations, and otherwise making it a pleasant place for Maeve. But there's no real incentive to do so. So most players will have three main rooms: storage, crafting, and farming. Hooboy, the crafting... There are no QoL features here. If you want to craft an item with a chain of requirements, be prepared to create spreadsheets to track how many you need of each item or else suffer the constant opening and closing of interfaces to craft yet another basic circuit. Oh, wait, you ran out of iron. Time for another trip to the dungeon to grab some iron just so you can craft the circuit to craft the advanced circuit to craft the bypass mole to craft the... You get the idea.

Again, none of this is a dealbreaker. It is still a very enjoyable game. It just has some unnecessary, unuseful friction. If I dwell on the friction for too long, I end up thinking it's a 4/7. If I just think about the gameplay loop and voice acting (and not their intersection), it's a decent 5/7.