PS5

Published on December 5th, 2024 | by Nay Clark

Towers of Aghasba Early Access Review (PS5)

Climb, hunt, and cultivate to rebuild a lost civilization! Towers of Aghasba is a role-playing adventure game with survival and crafting elements developed and published by Dreamlit Inc., and released in early access on November 19th of 2024. There are a lot of survival/crafting games that have you managing the durability of your items while fighting off hordes of terrifying organisms. Towers of Aghasba is more on the easy side of these types of games and the simple access is appreciated. Unfortunately, the game seems to bite off more than it can chew by being overly impractical in some facets. Purge the corruption that is blighting the world and plant and renew nature!

The game begins with the young protagonist that you play as waking up on the shore of an island with the rest of the shipwrecked crew. Your group is the Shimu, and you have traveled to the island of Aghasba to reclaim this former land of your ancestors. As the youngest Shimu and aspiring architect, you are one of the first to explore and scour this territory that was stripped away from your people. Frightening creatures and barren soil for crops hold the tribe back from prospering, but with the unique ability to harness a special life force through your tribe’s Amity Crystal, it is up to you to lead everyone and take control, refurbish your new home, and make Aghasba your homeland once again.

Towers of Aghasba has a lot of different gears that are rotating at the same time that you have to manage. The game rightfully starts off decently slow, deliberately teaching you concepts, definitions, and ideas one step at a time. Even playing at this leisure pace, words and tasks still get lost in translation due to the characters talking in a foreign language and the entire mythos being totally abstract. On top of everything not making sense because people are talking as if you are already familiar with this new world, you are given multiple tasks you need to accomplish. You are sort of just thrown into the world to figure things out, but I found myself lost for a while before I realized the place I needed to be was right at the beginning where I was in the first place. It is a bit dizzying at first, even with the help the game provides you, but the more you learn, the more comfortable you get, and the smoother the journey becomes.

The young apprentice you play as is incredibly nimble. A lot of actions that you can do like climbing up anything, running, or gliding with a parachute all run on a stamina meter very similar to other games that have made that mechanic popular like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In contrast to that game though, the stamina meter here is very forgiving, allowing you to accomplish many feats before becoming too tired. Controlling your character can be rough at times. The protagonist feels very loose and oftentimes gets caught on the environment, especially while climbing up hillsides and mountain ranges since there are so many jagged edges. The combat can feel especially hollow often because the movement is not tight. It isn’t horrible, but don’t be surprised if you whiff a lot of your swings and miss a lot of your shots due to the disproportionate amount of precision you must have. The heroes’ light-footedness and tolerable stamina meter makes getting around this world fun though and the fast gameplay makes your chores feel less like a chore and more like a recreation.

As the new architect on the block, you must determine where to build new places. The first thing that gets settled is the Farming Village. After collecting a certain amount of crafting items, you can rebuild structures to completion and then more people will gather there. Eventually you will be able to place more buildings and places and arrange them how you see fit. Completing tasks that others want you to complete rewards you with a variety of items that will help you maintain the inertia of the gameplay cycle. Sustaining this second to second design is definitely hard since the game seems to work against you in odd ways. There are so many items that you need to keep track of like rocks, flint, clay, seeds, and a variety of wood. Like a lot of survival/crafting games, progress will start slow, but it is agonizingly frustrating here in Towers of Aghasba. It feels as if it is trying to be different from the other games of its kind and helps you with an easy entrance, but it slaps your hand away at every chance it gets by being overly cumbersome with its mechanics.

There’s instantly a lot to collect and the game even makes that an awkward task to complete. Items that you can interact with and pick up have a small green icon over them to notify you that you can interact with it. The thing is, this icon is incredibly small and blends in with the environment so it is utterly useless. Half the time I was just running around hitting the harvest button to see what I can get which unfortunately made me lose all engagement and investment in this world that I had to rummage through to play. To harvest some materials, you need a tool like a shovel or a pickaxe. These tools can be put onto a wheel so you can quickly equip them, but I feel like there should be a more contemporary way to handle these tools overall. I found myself fumbling between the wheel, menus, and fighting off roaming enemies a little too often to the point that it got on my nerves. The objects you need to harvest with the tools are all next to each other and you have to constantly manually switch back and forth between all of them while also managing your small inventory space. You have stationery items boxes to make this problem easier, but for me, I was juggling everything between my personal inventory and what I kept in the box regularly. Obviously, you don’t have a lot of space to carry things at first, but this mixed with there being so many things that you need to carry and everything else creates a very unconventional pacing that makes you feel as if you are always tripping over yourself or doing something wrong.

I think a big selling point of Towers of Aghasba is that besides the town building, exploring, and combat, there is a feature with nature that you have to perpetuate as well. The Amity Crystal that is in your possession is of great historical significance to the Shimu tribe. With it, you can feel and guide the harmonious force that flows through all living things. You are gifted a Shimuscope which allows you to analyze a wide range of things like animals to see what sort of food they like and what you get if you can manage to eliminate them. This is a big responsibility and follows you throughout the entire time you play the game. Planting colossal trees changes everything around that seed into a specific ecosystem. Each ecosystem will be different depending what biome you are in which then attracts different creatures and plants to grow. The spirits of this world think humans are incompetent fools that only care about themselves. To appease the forest god and maintain a balance of peace and tranquility you must plant seeds and feed the wildlife to obtain the energy of Amity which you need to supercharge plants and other things. On the flip side, taking away life like killing animals, will sap away your Amity. I found this mixture between different mechanics pretty interesting and the crux of how you go about your decisions. This gives purpose to everything you do as well as setting up stakes if you fail to do something or panic and do something by accident.

Because Towers of Aghasba is in early access, the game as a whole doesn’t feel as complete as it should. Running into bugs or odd happenings is bound to happen and even if it wasn’t in early access, bizarre incidents tend to happen in creative games like this where you can actively manipulate the world and can contribute to the world in peculiar ways. I had a repeated issue with text staying on screen and overlaying more text so I couldn’t read anything. I chopped a tree down one time only for it to instantly respawn which allowed me to cut it down again and reap the benefits instantly. There are a lot of items that clip through clothing and objects, even in cutscenes. You’ll run into floating items and other weird circumstances, but glitches and bugs like this never actually hurt my experience playing the game.

Graphically, the game has an amazing art style. The characters move with purpose and some are very scraggly and have a theatrical manner of emoting and others are more firm and solid. These types of characteristics with this art style expresses strong personalities within all of the characters. The creatures are spectacular and you truly find some mind boggling intricate and spellbinding beasts. One of the very first quests you can find in the game is given to you by a family of large hands. Sound design is adequate and what you expect. Music is normally calming and gets more aggressive during combat encounters. Crunching of twigs and sifting of sand below your feet feels satisfying and does its job at keeping you enveloped in the world. I wasn’t super fond of the drivel speech, but the actual conversations can be really comical. I constantly said “No” whenever I could, which provided me with some hilarious results.

Final Thoughts?

Towers of Aghasba has some cool dynamics between a lot of its systems, but in the end, it feels sort of drab and mushed together. The ecosystem management and town building is fun to uphold, but with how much the game is eager to make you stumble over itself, your entire experience will be unfulfilling overall. Combat is okay and while other activities like fishing, using a bow and arrow, and gliding provide you with a variety of operations to achieve your goals, it’s hard to discern if you are actually having fun or just completing busy work. The game is dense, but it is not complicated. There is a lot you can do like collect masks, get recipes, cook, complete sidequests, find chests, plant seeds, feed animals, change your hairstyle, glide, arrange decorations, and more, but just because there is a lot to do it doesn’t automatically make it engrossing. I like Towers of Aghasba, but find it shallow overall and I felt like the parts that made this game creative didn’t really matter in the long run. The game does seem to have a very interesting roadmap so I am looking forward to seeing how the game comes together because it seems like a very promising and original approach to this genre.

About the Author

Nay Clark Gaming holds a special place in my heart and I never stop talking about video games. I really love all types of games and have an interest in games that have complicated stories and lore because I enjoy untangling the mystery of it all. When I'm not gaming, I unsuccessfully try to control three amazing and incredibly bright kids.

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