Aery - A New Frontier

No real gameplay involved except flying around painfully slow while collecting meaningless pickups that make the narrator narrate the next line from the high-school level script about a space exploration adventure. Kinda chill when you're not really looking for a real game but more of a narrated story. Except it crashed on me multiple times which always resets your checkpoint progress so you have to restart the whole level every time. Overall not an enjoyable experience.

I'll give this one a solid "meh." The scenery is fun and beautiful, the soaring and swooping is very relaxing. However, achievements are completely broken, and the narrative aspect feels contrived. Each level gives you 35-ish targets to reach, fed one at a time, and triggering a line of the story. In order to stretch the story out, the lines are short, a little repetitive, and often shallow in content. The effect is the story feels like one of those horrible click-bait articles that promises to tell you some juicy tidbit but only after you wade through 100 pages of absolute nonsense couched as back story. The scenery, while interesting, doesn't really seem to relate directly to the story being told.

I love this game, Good story about greed of people with beautiful view. But... unfortunately I have to admit that sometimes it is unclear in which direction you have to go, especially when the points are far away from each other, and unfortunately you don't always get the achievements. But still wonderful game.

PLAYED ON STEAM DECK My recommendation comes with a pair of caveats: 1) this is a mindless "flying simulator" that has a pretty visual style and engaging soundtrack with minimal story and less player agency. Knowing this is paramount because if you want any level of interactivity aside from tilting a single joystick then this game is wrong for you. 2) If you like achievements and hunt them, beware that not one of them popped for me when they were supposed to and based on a fast bit of research, this is a common issue for all games in this franchise. Overall, a good way to calm down before bed or release stress after a tough day, but not much else.

I found this game to very zen in the short time I had with it and I could see myself getting lost in this gameplay loop easily! [b]FULL VIDEO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4lVATF7ExE[/b]

I wanted to like this game, but twice it got stuck in the first level. I followed what seemed like the critical path, but eventually just ended up in empty space.