Aether & Iron by co-developers Chaos Theory Games and Seismic Squirrel and published by Seismic Squirrel—PC (Steam) review written by Hayden with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
This is a game that drops you straight into a story and setting out of a noir film. Filled with shady characters hiding mysterious pasts and painful secrets, Aether & Iron wastes no time with a barrage of immersion-breaking tutorials that want you to press WASD and fiddle with the mouse wheel to control the camera. Instead, your tutorial comes piece by piece as you complete the first chapter of the game, hiding instruction behind impeccably on-tone voice acting and gorgeous tableau.
Aether & Iron leans into an aesthetic partway between old noir detective films, retro art-deco sci-fi imagery, and just a touch of steampunk. On the character side, there is plenty of visual contrast between the working stiffs with stained coveralls, the high-society elites in impeccable suits and dresses, and our smuggler protagonist in her interwar style that combines detective and mob enforcer - all of which reinforce a very class-stratified setting. In Aethor & Iron, if you want to get ahead you don’t just climb a social ladder, you literally go up. In this version of New York, society doesn’t just create metaphorical islands, it has made literal ones, floating via giant gravity-controlling ‘aether engines’. It literally stratifies the city’s social order in a way that reinforces both how low you are at the start of the game and how you can try to claw your way up.
As visually stunning as this is, however, don’t expect a lot of animation on the screen. For most of the game this plays as a narrative RPG - a large static splash background image on which the player can point-and-click the item they want to interact with, a sidebar for quest text, decisions and dice-based skill checks, and often an image of the primary character speaking in the scene. And I do mean speaking! There is a huge amount of voice acting in the game, and at least in the base English version I was hard pressed to find much deviation between the voice acting and the text lines. The extent and quality of the voice acting actually brought out one of my few annoyances with the game: I’m personally a fairly fast reader, and this meant at times I would be done reading a block of text before the voice over for the same piece was, leading me to either have to stop and wait while it caught up or click forward and in doing so skip some of the wonderful work that was done here. Whether or not that’s a concern for anyone else however, is going to be entirely down to personal taste.
The place where there is animation, however, is combat. There’s a bit of a stereotype that no action movie is complete without a car chase, and Aether & Iron seems to have taken that to the extreme. You don’t dodge around behind crates and try to sneak between pillars here - no, not even close. If there’s combat, it's in cars as you race down city streets, shooting at your target in between (or through, if you’re unscrupulous) innocent bystanders. Action is turn-based as the combatants speed along, with each vehicle having a customizable loadout of weapons, armor and special equipment. Bystanders, road splits and merges, falling debris and construction works all create hazards that keep the challenge fresh. Certain quests will also require in-vehicle action, doing things like trying to disable a train running alongside the road while simultaneously trying to ward off the local authorities.
Did I mention customization? Aether & Iron lets players choose from a variety of vehicle, from light sedans that slide around the road like metallic piranhas to large transport trucks that can conceal flamethrowers, miniguns and all sorts of fantastical heavy weapons (and maybe an entire bank’s worth of ill-gotten loot). Each member of the player’s party drives their own vehicle in combat, with their skills and abilities determining what vehicles they can drive and influencing the options available each turn. Of course, you can also customize the paint job on your vehicles, and in my case I was soon burning up the streets in a fleet of vehicles sporting a flashy yellow-and-black combination that fell somewhere between ‘angry taxi’ and ‘overgrown hornet’.
Beyond the cars, each character in your crew can level up over time and put points into various skill trees that unlock bonuses in and out of car-combat. From bonuses on skill checks to automatic vehicle repairs and free counterattacks, you’ll never have enough points to have everything you want all the time. Well, not on a single character, at least. By carefully balancing out the skills of the people in your crew, you can cover most areas if that’s what you want. Or maybe it's better to go all in and get really good at one thing? You’ll have to play for yourself to decide.
Deciding. Now that’s an interesting part of the game for sure. While Aether & Iron casts you in the role of a smuggler, there’s nothing that says you have to be a certain kind of smuggler. You want to play it like a persuasive fast-talker who always seems to bend the deal their way? You can do that. You want to play hardball with threats backed up by a copious amount of lead? You can do that too. However you play it, you’ll have to live with your choices and their consequences. Killing someone now might ensure they can’t be a threat later, but might turn those that knew them against you. Showing mercy to an outmaneuvered foe on the other hand might keep your body count down and your profile off the authorities radar, but can leave you open to later betrayal. Either way, you’re going to have to deal with the results down the line, so think hard before you pull the trigger - but not too long! Beyond the moral choices, there’s another element as well. While many scenes give you the option to interact with a variety of objects, observations and people, you never know when something might trigger another activity, forever preventing you from learning what was behind Door #2.
Overall, this is a clear story with choices that feel like they matter. Top-notch voice acting and eye-catching visuals are coupled here with enough character and vehicle customization to make each playthrough different, and I’m looking forward to having a chance to replay the game to try a different route. The main story scenes might not have as many flashing lights and sudden jump-scares as some 3D over-the-shoulder detective games, but the gorgeous tableau art keeps you immersed in a consistent style in a way that running a character around to poke into every broom closet and washroom stall never could. An extremely solid narrative RPG and well worth your time!
Summary
This is a clear story with choices that feel like they matter - Aether & Iron is already quietly stealing away with my time like a mysterious stranger in a trench coat! Top-notch voice acting and eye-catching visuals are coupled here with enough character and vehicle customization to make each playthrough different. A very solid narrative RPG that will take every minute you can give it, and maybe a few more!
Score: 9.5 / 10
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