Sometimes it’s hard to get a read on a game. Ary and the Secret of Seasons is hard for me to read. Every time I found something I enjoyed in the game it would be perfectly balanced by something I thought didn’t stack up. I felt conflicted as soon as I gained control of the protagonist and while my opinion changed over time, I’m still split in two on this game.
Ary and the Secret of Seasons is an action-adventure game where you control Aryelle, a young girl who gains the ability to change the seasons in a small area around her. Creating these climactic biomes allows her to solve environmental puzzles around the world as well as change the behavior of certain enemies. Changing the climate isn’t the only thing you’ll be doing though as Ary finds a sword, a slingshot, and even boots that give her a double jump. She also manages to find items that help augment her abilities like seasonal pebbles that manipulate the environment further away from Ary at range. I was given a chance to play through the very early game as well as a dungeon much further into the Ary. While initially, I found the puzzles very bland, when given a look at some of the puzzles later on, I was pleasantly surprised and satisfied with the puzzle-solving I was performing.
Immediately I noticed the high quality of the voiceover performance; VA and direction, I salute you. Ary begins by telling a story of a hero and an evil mage. The voice actress for Ary makes up voices, throws out different inflections to her voice, and overall offers a delightful performance that I was able to enjoy the whole way through the preview build. Likewise, other characters were pulling their weight as well. As a game clearly written with a younger audience in mind, I was still able to really enjoy the story and especially Ary’s little quips during battle. “You’re closed for winter!” She’d say knocking out a hyena or, “You’re out of season!”
Some little things also stuck out that really lifted my mood. When Ary goes to pull a lever, she’s just a little bit too small to do it with just her hands. So the animation to move a lever from left to right (and vice versa) is Ary pushing with her whole body, getting it to about half-way, then climbing onto the lever’s platform and pushing the lever the rest of the way with her back and shoulders. Not only is the animation for this absolutely stellar, but it’s one of those corners that could have easily been cut and nobody would have said anything. It’s strange because while there were levels of detail like this one that made me wonder how some of the other design decisions came to be.
There are several things that threw up some red flags almost immediately in Ary. Because while I was enjoying the puzzle-solving, the exploration, even the side-quests from villagers around town, I had my gripes. First and foremost was the varying frame rate. I mucked around in the settings and was able to get a solid 60 frames per second in most places but those places I wasn’t able to eke out the required frames for my enjoyment, it was noticeable. Another problem I had was with the flighty/floaty animations, sometimes not lining up with my actions which became very jarring. Issues aside I soldiered on and was greeted with what I think is one of the worst water textures I’ve ever seen in a game. The water in the town is clear as day but the second you hop in this frothy white circle emanates from Ary in a way that I could only describe as off-putting and boring.
UI elements fell flat as well, with the quest log just being a floating list sitting lazily at the forefront of the screen. This is in sharp contrast to the UI elements directly above it showing the seasons you’re able to create biomes for, the region you’re currently in, and your health. Sadly, that appears to be the only UI element that has had any care given to it. The map is big and pixelated without any useful markers, some not even being updated when the world changes. While the icon art for items in your inventory is nice, the inventory itself was difficult to manage with seemingly arbitrary categories that were maybe filtered down a little too much.
The biggest shame of it all is that my list of grievances is, what I think, fairly small and reasonable. I’m not daft enough to think everything could be resolved in a month, but I think given more development time Ary and the Secret of Seasons could be a great game. The foundation is solid and there are already some delicious trimmings. With a lot of work and some updates, I hope the team over at eXiin can bring out the game I believe Ary and the Secret of Seasons to be next month on release.
