It's hard to review a game like this that is obviously somebody's baby. If the owner is reading this, I wanna make it clear that I have so much respect for the fact that this exists at all, and I hope this review encourages you rather than dismisses the insane amount of hard work and talent you've put into this. It is remarkably impressive to make something like this at all and you should be extremely proud.
This feels like a game very clearly made by an artist. There is a remarkable amount of care and effort put into the visual art, the vast and beautifully-rendered variety in items and locations, and the world itself which does feel like it has depth and lore and charm. There are SO many items, and there really don't even need to be, but there are and it makes the world feel bigger. It's a nice detail and something that must have taken an absolutely insane amount of time, and yet is something 99% of people won't even think about, so I need to give major praise for that.
With that being said, it feels like this game is significantly more right brain than left brain, if that makes sense. It is beautifully and passionately crafted, but the gameplay and QOL aspects are where things really fall apart. I should disclaim right now that I didn't even manage to obtain my first pet (at least...I think?), and so I cannot in good faith give a firm rating, but I think the fact I wasn't able to do that is reason enough to write this review, as I feel I gave it a very reasonable shot and put in way, way more time than the average player would.
The art of game design has so many facets, but I think one of the single most important concepts is that of "new player on-boarding".
I would highly, HIGHLY recommend this video by Josh Strife Hayes to learn more about it, but the axiom is this: You could have the most amazing game in the world, but if you aren't putting your focus on making sure new players see exactly what you have to offer sooner rather than later, your game will be dead in the water. My favorite quote from this video is,
"The percentage of players who will experience your end-game content is very small. The percentage of players who will experience your tutorial is 100%."
Aethria struggles heavily with this, and I think it's a major, major problem. The fact that the owner is here wanting to share their creation and get more players is half the reason I'm writing this, because I think until the site is critically examined through the eyes of a new player and development focuses on eliminating as many "quit moments" as possible, they won't find that growth that they want and deserve.
The problem actually begins before the tutorial. That "sign up" button is the very first hurdle any online game has to get over -- why should I, a potential new player passing through, go out of my way to make an account? The ways a site can answer this question varies, but the number one priority, in my opinion, is to make sure that the answer is as easy as possible to get to. Heck, I'd say make the first page a logged-out player can access the answer!
When a new player has to click around, blind and confused, trying to figure out what the game is about and what it has to offer, every one of those clicks is a possible quit moment. All the quit moments I went through before I even had an account were as followed:
• The home page is vague about gameplay
("raise virtual pets"; okay, what makes you different from the hundreds of other sites where I can do that? "dynamically grow mini-pets and items"; what does this mean? What is a mini-pet and what is dynamic growth? "explore"; explore how and what? The site's pages? A world map? What will I find and how will that affect me? Is it point-and-click through webpages or is there an RPG?)
• "Help" page contains only a quick-start guide. This is a step-by-step tutorial of what to do first, not a showcase of what the game has to offer, so contains nothing about the core, long-term gameplay nor actual pets, which are the primary draw of a virtual pet game.
• Quick-start guide comes with a video tutorial that's unedited and overly long. I am neurodivergent with attention and processing issues so I couldn't watch the whole thing, but a brief click-through seems to indicate the same problems -- nothing to do with the actual pets or the game's strengths.
• Encyclopedia page is absolutely full of jargon and all about things I don't yet know exist. I have no clue which to click on to find out what the core gameplay is like.
Finally, I clicked on the page in the Encyclopedia that sounded most like it was about the actual pets ("Aethers - Customs, doppels, and features") and found what I was looking for! This page showcases that Aethria actually has an extremely cool pet system, with infinite color combinations, cool genes, and apparently even procedural fusion!
This single page is what encouraged me to sign up, and it was buried behind pages and jargon. After all, I'm a new player, I have no way to tell whether an "Aether" is late-game or a core concept. I think -- and I imagine the dev and players probably think too -- that Aethria's number one strength is its pet system, and so I would really, really encourage the developer to make sure that this is the first thing potential new players see! Put your best foot forward and show them the core of what you have to offer!
So, I was convinced to give it a shot. But consider how many times I almost turned back in just this process alone. I adore virtual pet games with extreme pet diversity and so I pushed through, determined to figure out if this was the game with the kind of system I'd been looking for, but most passers-by are not going to have this same determination.
And then, unfortunately, the quit moments just kept on coming. There was no tutorial, I was just told to go back to the quick-start guide. The video I linked earlier explains why these kinds of "owner's manual" tutorials are a really bad idea -- it feels like homework. You have to stop playing the game and first study up on how. It's disconnected from the experience, and often the player will need two tabs open, one for playing and one for checking back on the tutorial. For advice on designing good tutorials, again, the video's gotcha.
Now, most virtual pet games will begin with you obtaining your first pet before absolutely anything else, and there's a reason for this: the point of the game is the pets. At its very core, it's a
virtual pet game; the pets are what players are signing up for, and the rest should be designed around that core. You can (probably should!) totally, absolutely have extras, like gardening and exploring and all that, but you need to remember that the core is why people are here!
So, the fact that Aethria does not give you a starter pet is a really major quit moment. You're expected to, instead, start grinding, and start grinding
hard.
The very first thing you're told to do is start gathering. Now, I've gotta give Aethria praise here, because out of all the gathering systems I've experienced, this one is definitely closer to the top. Games at the very peak of this genre, such as Flight Rising, will give you around ten turns a day to gather items, and then that's it -- for the rest of the day, that part of the gameplay is at a hault, and you've gotta find other ways of entertaining yourself. I never really liked this, and thankfully Aethria has a different way of doing it! Every area has its own foraging timer, and every timer resets in an hour. Given there are six gathering areas, that means every hour you can get sixty new items. And killing an hour of time on a good pet site is not difficult to do, so it feels extremely generous and keeps the player online.
There are SO many items to gather, too. The gathering is split up between two different islands, so each item pool has different functions. The first batch you can sell for currency
(and the prices are always a little random and fluctuate every hour so if you like waiting to make extra profits you're gonna be real happy with this system) and the second is for crafting tablets that create new pets. This means there are a lot of great long-term goals you can work towards, and everything you're able to craft or sell at a good price feels rewarding. There's even one spot with a beehive, where if you click there you might either get a rare and valuable honeycomb item, or lose all your remaining gathering turns, which I thought was a fun little detail.
The third island also has a gather system, except it's completely different! Instead of gathering turns, you need to pay in currency to pick up the items you find. This gives meaning to the currency you earn with gathering, because these items are used for little missions to get even more money. Unlike the other two gathering islands, you can just keep clicking around forever, though it seems like there's some kinda "restock" timer going on in the background to slow you down because once something's bought it gives you a "Nothing here..." option for a bit until it decides to restock. And considering this screen is actually shared between players, I have no clue how to predict when it restocks. Is it when players buy them all? If players don't buy anything, do they still reroll? What's the timer like on this? I actually don't mind not knowing; I think it's interesting and keeps you hanging around and thinking trying to figure out the pattern.
But definitely the best feature here is that it's not only quest items here, but garbage you can collect for free. Collect enough trash and you can exchange it for more money as well as some collectable items (that I can't for the life of me figure out the purpose of, I think they might just be collectables). This one feature prevents the horrible issue so many of these virtual pet sites have where the player just runs out of things to do and has to wait for the next day to be able to actually play the game again. You could technically just do this forever and gradually grow richer and richer while also gathering items, including the ones you need to get a pet in the first place.
The fact that there's so much variety and depth to these really simple systems most games don't think twice about is really admirable. Grinding wasn't very fast but it was easy and not unfair nor entirely uninteresting, so I think I spent around four hours doing this. Again, I think applause is in order for that.
But, unfortunately, gathering is very seldom the primary system in any game, and there's a reason for this -- it isn't super fun nor interesting. It's a suppliment, an easy extra activity to waste time on and feel productive while you're neglecting your homework. So while this is a good gathering system, I can't help but wonder if all this effort wouldn't have been best spent elsewhere.
For example, we gotta talk more about that "no first pet" problem, because it's a very big one. The way you get pets in this game is via this gathering grinding. And if you're a player who already has a pet or two, this is great! A relatively easy longer-term goal for a fun bonus of a completely new pet. But the new players are expected to do this just to get started.
From what I can tell, there are two kinds of pets -- one obtained through tablets which are crafted with gathered materials from the second island, and one obtained through purchasing rare spawns through the third. Each of these are extremely slow for different reasons. For the former, the amount of gathered materials you need is insane. Ten groups of ten items. Considering just how many items there are, this is going to take you a ridiculously long time, and you're waiting an hour between each ten-item gathers. But even wilder? It seems like you need TWENTY of these tablets to summon a pet.
Again, this is fine for long-term, but right now? I want a pet now, and this is very clearly out of reach. Okay, so what about the second option? You need to find fifty stones. Fifty items that do not spawn often and cost a not insignificant amount of money to pick up. Definitely more accessable, but this is still going to take forever! After my around five hours of play, I managed to get only 22.
Unless you go really digging around, these appear to be kind of your only options. There is a third one, but I genuinely didn't know it existed until this very moment when I was re-reading the Aethers page. It appears the way to get Aethers is to either pay with premium currency or clone another player's for whatever prices they list. The lowest listed price for cloning (creating a "Doppel") seems to be 8,000. This isn't an unobtainable amount, but it does take a bit of time. After my five hours, I had 3,000, though I'd been buying a lot of stuff. I did a gathering session on the first island to find items to sell, and it brought me up to 4,500, so I'll collect some garbage to have enough to get myself a Doppel and keep writing in a sec. I'm doing this because I want to really give this game a fair shot and write this review in good faith, but I think it's worth noting that I don't think 99% of players would bother.
Alright, I think that took me about an hour. I now have my first Aether and am realizing that it is, in fact,
not a Doppel. But she is a cool rainbow raptor and I love her. But that really just goes to show, right? I
STILL have no clue what I'm doing, even though I'm actively digging through pages trying to figure it out. This is a problem, and it's half the fault of a poor onboarding system and half an issue with the crazy amounts of jargon the game is throwing at me. Custom, Doppel, Aether, Inkling, Khim, Marketplace, player auctions, silver charms, breed sprites, elemental spirits...I am a new player,
I don't know what any of these things are, nonetheless their significance or how they interact with each other. I cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure the player is able to follow along with these things, and a long paragraph buried in a guide is just not sufficient unfortunately.
I ended up taking a peek in the forums, clicking on a random thread about a development map, and discovering that Doppels actually just...don't exist yet. So I essentially just totally wasted my time and currency buying a Doppel charm, and now I'll have to grind another three hours to buy my second Aether. I'm sorry to say that this was my final quit moment because I didn't feel I could trust the information on the site anymore and didn't want to be digging through forum posts all day.
Which is a major shame because, with that being said, I really like Aethers. I think they look cool, have a ton of depth to them, and the customization options for their pages are sweet! I love that you can give them a title and custom CSS, and their markings/traits can not only be literally any color in the world, but also a whole bunch of awesome patterns such as glitch effects and gradients. It seems the fun of Aethers is just collecting them and seeing what new combinations you can make next, and I am totally on board with that because it seems like there are quite a lot.
With that being said, we run into another issue with jargon here. Given Aethers have unique mechanics, I'm actually not certain they're even pets? These may be the "mini-pets" the opening blurb was talking about, but in that case what is the difference? Unlike Aethers, there's no guide in the Encyclopedia about them, so I have no clue if they have a similar genetics system or are just different things entirely. It seems like one of these pets, Khins, are actually premade, which I always find far less interesting than random genetic systems (unless there are like. TONS of them), but I don't know because there's no information on these systems.
With that being said, I decided to check out the account of a moderator that was online. Inklings seem to have a variety of subspecies/breeds, and they do have random colors and premade markings! It seems Khin are entirely premade. I do like a lot that they have both options!
Alright, since I stopped playing here, I'm going to wrap up this review with two more topics: QOL and development.
There are a lot of QOL issues with this site. The whole page reloads when you talk to an NPC, there's MAJOR menu flow issues where you've gotta click like four times to get to the page you want, the point-and-click gameplay is coded weird where it implies you should be able to click anywhere but you actually can't, so you kinda just have to wave your cursor around watching for it to turn into its clicky sprite...little things like that make the experience feel rather clunky.
With that being said, on the topic of QOL and development, that development map I stumbled across earlier has UI reworking at the very top, which I think is good! But I really strongly believe that
everything on this list pales in comparison to the importance of streamlining the onboarding process, and my advice to the dev(s) would be to put all of their focus on that.
While I was looking at my Aether, I noticed a little, unassuming link at the top of the page that said "Claim Free Aether". The first thing I thought was "omg, why wasn't I shown this earlier?" and then...I clicked it, and was taken to a blank page that was just the words "Feature discontinued". I really hope this is brought back -- I think new players should get two random Aethers to play with to begin, and if they like the Aether system they will naturally want to grind to get more since the collecting and the variety is the fun of them. I also think new players should get an Inkling or two, and maybe a Khin or two, though I don't know if there's a difference beyond aesthetics or if they do the same things.
Aethria is a beautiful game with a metric ton of (very hidden) depth. I can imagine hearing that a player didn't enjoy the experience is not pleasant for you, dev, who's put so much hard work and passion into this, and when a player like me, someone who is interested and driven to figure things out feels pushed away, it makes me sad, too! I would be totally open to coming back and giving Aethria another shot, but, as it is, I'm afraid I won't be logging in again.
It is extremely hard to rate something like this because I don't feel I've seen even, like, a quarter of it. Because of that (and the not insignificant amount of pros!), it wouldn't feel right to be rating this below three stars. However, at the same time, I don't feel I could recommend this game to anyone, which is a major shame.
In closing, seriously, dev, if you're reading this, you are absolutely remarkable. What you've created here is nothing short of incredible; art is really hard, coding is really hard, and, well, gameplay is really hard! The fact that you're already so skilled at the first two is nothing short of a superpower in my opinion, and so I don't think I nor anyone else can blame you at all for being a little shabbier in the game design department. After all, nobody's a master of everything. But, if you're looking to get new players, I would highly suggest studying up on game design and making sure newbies are able to experience this incredible thing you've made at its best as soon as possible. It's obvious to anybody with eyes that you have a deep passion for this project, and I hope you never stop creating.
