I spent a lot of this morning throwing fruit at a tiny hippo. Sometimes the hippo ate the fruit, which was what I intended. Sometimes the fruit missed and rolled away and was lost forever. Sometimes – very occasionally – I pressed the wrong button and ate the fruit myself. A pain, really, because the fruit is quite hard to gather and stock up on.
Welcome to Towers of Aghasba, a new indie survival game in which you lead a group of characters trying to rebuild their community on a scrabbly island. I’ve been playing it for the best part of a morning, and I can report that it’s one of those games where the feature creep is strong. You gather materials and craft items that allow you to gather new kinds of materials. You build villages and upgrade them. You tend to biomes by planting magical trees. You explore and observe animals and feed them and hunt them. You swim and climb and dive and glide. On and on it goes, and it’s still only just started in Early Access.
It’s scrappy but good natured, I think. The movement is a bit weightless and the camera is a touch too fast to turn. It’s cheerfully buggy: at one point I went hunting for fish and was delighted, if confused, to find the fish swimming through the air just above a lake. Rough edges, Early Access. But within a few moments of the opening shipwreck, I was off swimming, gathering supplies and getting myself set up on my new home, too. I gathered sticks and stones and bits of grass to get crafting moving along. I picked an area for that first village and planted that first tree. I met a bunch of elders who sent me down different questlines, all of them handily standing on outcrops of rock looking to the horizon like the wanderer above the sea of fog. They gave me tutorials in rudimentary combat and tools to observe animals to build up a kind of Pokédex. Mostly they set me off doing things.
There is already a lot of doing stuff in Towers of Aghasba. After a morning with the game I’d say it’s fairly frontloaded with doing. And that’s fine. This is a great game to dive into not with any set plan but with a stretch of empty time to fill. I’ll load it up and say: let’s give this fifteen minutes. Then I see what needs doing – how many trees need planting, how many animals need feeding, how much dung needs collecting (which in turn requires the feeding of animals) and whether there’s anything new I can craft to make life easier. I mean this in the very best way: Towers of Aghasba is very good at mindlessness, and I’ll take that.
But at some point this morning I got a bit bored of all the doing on offer and just wandered off to see what I could find for myself. And this is where I really started to enjoy the game this small team at Dreamlit is building. The starter island is not particularly big, and a lot of it looks like a burn area from a forest fire. But I found a characterful rock to climb – the climbing and gliding system is straight out of Zelda, with the same kind of stamina meter – and better yet, halfway up I found broken steps chiselled into the surface of the stone. Onwards I went, following steps where there were steps, moving between fragments of ancient things that someone, at some point in the past, had built, until I found a nice little plateau with a decent view and some friendly old ruins. It felt like a personal discovery, just the kind of thing you hope for in a break from busywork.
Inevitably, once I explored the ruins I discovered that they were tempting me back towards doing again. More elements to craft, more resources to gather. But that’s fine, I think. Deep down, I think Towers of Aghasba is interested in balance – build the village but also tend the biome tree, hunt the animals but also learn to feed them and let them grow – and if it can balance a bit of lonely wandering with the simple pleasures of watching resource piles build up, I’ll be pretty happy I reckon.
A copy of Towers of Aghasba was provided by developer Dreamlit Inc.