Creatures of Ava is a new game from developer Inverge Studios and publisher 11 Bit Studios that, by its own description, is a “unique creature-saver” game. It’s an interesting trend that recently seems to have become more popular, especially in the indie and AA spaces. Creating new genre descriptors to sell unique experiences. Existing video game genres are incredibly restrictive, after all. But that doesn’t mean that more often than not, much of the game will have familiar elements, even if they’re arranged in a somewhat new way. And in the case of Creatures of Ava, I’m not sure how much new there really is.
The story starts, as many stories do, with a young girl and the death of her parents. But, we skip past that part pretty quickly to get to the actual story. Our main character, Vic, lands on the planet Ava and is there to fulfill a mission. The planet seems to be dying due to an infection, and so you’re here to gather the many creatures that can be found here and beam them up to the Bioark to preserve the species. But before you can do that, you will often need to cleanse them of their infections first and then learn to tame them. At the same time as this mission is going on with your science buddies, you also learn to connect with the world of Ava and its inhabitants. Many of them aren’t exactly fans of humans, because, as it turns out, you’re not the first human to come to this planet. But disregard all that, as your partner Tabitha keeps reminding you to “focus on the mission.” Giving away any more of the story would be moving into spoiler territory, although given how predictable it all is, that wouldn’t matter much. It’s a story that has been told many times before, and in better ways too.
What’s not helping the story is that basically every single mission in it is a fetch quest. Running back and forth between Tribe Elder, Quest Item, Tribe Elder, some NPC, Tribe Elder, and so on is basically all there is. There’s a reason that, despite the rather small world and short travel distances, there are fast travel spots and shortcuts to unlock at every turn. They know traveling from A to B is basically all you do in this game, and it would be egregious without ways to make those ways as short as possible once you’ve completed them the first time. Especially since there isn’t much of anything to make traversal interesting either. When you aren’t doing fetch quests, you’re saving creatures, and you’ll have to save a certain amount of them in each biome to progress.
So when it comes to the creatures, there are a few things going on mechanically. First, you have to photograph them with your camera to get information about them, and then save them in your Avapedia. Then you have to tame them using your flute. There’s a specific melody for every species, but don’t worry; you don’t need to know them all by heart. Just repeat whatever sounds the creature howls at you. Once you have tamed them, they follow you around, so you can bring them to a nearby drone and beam them up to your team. Once tamed, you can also take over their bodies and control them, which gives you different abilities to solve (very) simple puzzles. This is actually a pretty interesting mechanic. It also isn’t taken advantage of nearly enough. Since 1) as mentioned before, the puzzles are extremely simple, and 2) there are maybe 5 abilities spread among the 20+ creatures, so there isn’t nearly enough variation to make the different creatures feel distinct enough.
The designs of the creatures are mostly fine though, even if they’re not groundbreaking, and overall, I’d say the art direction is one of the stronger aspects of the game. While it has some of that Fortnite (2017) look that seems to be getting more common recently, the planet of Ava is filled with bright colors across its different biomes. It’s the expected ones: jungle, swamp, desert, but they make for some nice vistas as you gaze upon them, and the creatures within each fit in well. Unfortunately, you can tell some of the budget was lacking in the character models, which look a little rough and aren’t voiced for many parts of the game either.
There’s one more major mechanic in Creatures of Ava, which is how you deal with the corruption that’s taking over the planet. In the opening section of the game, you find an old artifact, a staff, that unlocks new abilities as you play through the game. But the most basic one is that you can now shoot a beam at anything corrupted, primarily creatures and objects in the environment, to cure them. Imagine the vacuum from Luigi’s Mansion (2001) and it’s basically the same. You shoot it at something and then slowly drain it of its corruption, unable to do anything else, and if anything hits you while you’re doing it, you get interrupted, which is how the combat against corrupted creatures comes to exist, that is mostly pretty underwhelming. With the other abilities that you unlock over the duration of the game, such as making rocks levitate and slowing individual objects down, you need to overcome environmental puzzles, but once again, they’re extremely simple.
Creatures of Ava is a game that mostly underwhelmed me. There isn’t a whole lot interesting going on, and if an element seems promising, it usually doesn’t live up to its potential. The gameplay quickly becomes tedious, the story is extremely lackluster, and if I’m told I have to run somewhere and then back for my next mission once more, then I don’t even know anymore. It’s not hard to imagine a good version of Creatures of Ava, but this one is just deeply mediocre.
Nairon played Creatures of Ava on PC with a review code.
