A couple of years ago, I had the chance to check out an E3 demo for Sands of Aura. It was promising an intriguing mix of Diablo and Dark Souls in terms of gameplay, and the demo of the time seemed to indicate Chashu Entertainment was on the right track. Of course, that was over two years ago. Things have certainly changed and the game is preparing for its full release on Steam. Was it worth the wait? I would say “yes,” though there are some big caveats.
Sands of Aura puts you in the role of a Remnant Knight, last of a failing order of protectors in the dying world of Talamhel. Once, Talamhel was verdant, thriving, and bountiful. Now, all that remains is an endless ocean of sand and small islands of civilization scattered between cyclopean ruins. Water is more precious than gold and, as the story opens, your home town recently used up a tremendous amount of water to put out a fire in the local church. Your mentor, Lawrence, has you accompany him below the town of Starspire to tap a reservoir to help replenish the stocks. Unfortunately, the reservoir has become tainted by corrupted creatures, which means you are off to seek new sources of fresh water to save Starspire. What follows is notionally an epic adventure across seas of sand, through sodden graveyards and burning ruins, meeting a wild array of characters, and slowly unlocking the truth about your world.
From a visual perspective, Sands of Aura conveys the soaring scale of its world even as it seems to enclose its adventuring areas in diorama-like zones. There’s a great deal of verticality to the environments, both natural and constructed, and the desire to explore is tempered by the enemies you’ll come across. Different sites have their own themes to them, suggesting that you’re standing in places that once belonged to different cultures. The sailing sections of the game look incredible, the ship having an appearance that conjures to mind both the early years of the steam engine as well as a post-apocalyptic “we cobbled this together from what was handy” vibe. The character models definitely have a somewhat caricatured design to them, almost like characters from a Tim Burton film, and it fits both the colossal style and the constrained boundaries of each locale. Visual effects are subdued, but nicely executed, again helping bolster the feeling that you’re one small adventurer in a very big place.
As far as the user interface, it’s clean, easy to navigate, and doesn’t get in your way while you’re exploring. If there’s any complaint, it’s that there’s a distinct lack of a mini-map or zone map you can reference. While it seems like that might not be necessary for maps which are as physically compact as they appear to be, certain areas like your home base of Starspire have a lot going on within their confines. Hunting down NPCs and being able to see transition points which otherwise blend into the surroundings are small quality-of-life points which are conspicuously absent and add a bit of needless friction. In the same vein, while you’ve got a good notion about your health and the “corruption” meter which fuels your special attacks, you’re far less informed about things like “poise damage” and the duration of various potables you drink. It’s the little things that are good to know which are missing, which makes adventuring a little more cumbersome than it ought to be.
The audio elements of Sands of Aura are a highly mixed bag. Sound effects are certainly present, but fairly subdued. The musical score is low key and appropriately diverse for the different areas and activities you’re undertaking, but it’s sometimes a little hard to hear, even with the volume cranked up fully. Still, it’s one of the better scores I’ve heard this year and I wouldn’t mind having a copy for curling up and relaxing. The biggest stumbles are in regards to the voice acting. There are a number of really good performances from the voice cast. But some of those performances seem to be suffering from some kind of mixing or positional audio problem because they are almost unintelligible, delivered at a volume level far below lines which came before or come after them. For each good performance, however, we also seem to get a “WTF?!” performance of exceedingly poor quality. For example, the tavern owner in Starspire has a marked Southern US accent and she’s the only person in town to have one. Throughout my playthrough, I never found another character with a similar accent, which in turn kind of threw me out of the setting, rupturing the suspension of disbelief. Aside from that, there are performances which are just unconvincing, uninspiring, and sometimes flat out terrible. It all averages out, I suppose, but it definitely hurts the overall feel.
When I played the demo two years ago, Sands of Aura had the combat feel of a Soulslike but the loot drops and inventory management of a Diablo clone. Things have definitely changed in that regard. The combat is still Soulslike in its fundamental nature, but the Diablo-esque perspective makes for occasional hilarity when moving or trying to make an attack. There’s a level of “floatiness” to your character when falling or jumping, a point which discouraged me from trying to obtain certain items during exploration. When it comes to the actual fighting, Sands of Aura seems to sit in a strange intersection between Soulsborne, Metroidvania, and Diablo clone. Enemies appear in the same spots every time, but they do not patrol. You can kite a lot of them easily enough, drawing them to ground more favorable to you. You’ve got a limited number of heals, represented here by small hand bells, with specific spots to recharge your healing bells (and reset all the enemies). Downed foes drop currency which you need to improve your gear, and getting killed means you lose all your stored currency (though not all your items, which is helpful). Get killed a second time and you’re going to lose that great heaping wad of cash you dropped the first time around. The only exception to this is when you’re on your ship and die by some terrible misadventure. Being able to see the enemies from an elevated perspective of sorts definitely helps you plan your movements more easily.
At the same time, though, it feels like you’ve got a much higher “wall” in terms of power level which you have to clear before taking on certain zones and bosses. That means you’re going to be doing a lot of grinding to build up the coin and materials you need to improve your gear, which is the only way you’re getting more powerful. As you explore, you’ll discover new armor sets with specific bonuses which will either flow with or dictate your particular play style. You’ll also come across manuals for components which will provide modifications to your weapons, further refining their potential. And you can imbue your attacks, blocks, and dodges with spell effects provided you can find the manuals. But, again, it’s going to take a lot of currency to build up.
As you improve armor sets, they’ll open up slots for rune stones, providing further opportunities for refining your equipment. The systems involved are simple, but not simplistic. However, you’re probably going to be spending a lot of time trying to figure out what weapon and armor combinations work best for you. Worse, certain armor sets are stashed on islands which are considerably more difficult to face than what you can handle at the start. And all of them start off at level 1, which means material and currency reserves are needed to get them up to snuff once you find them. On the other hand, if you don’t mind getting your ass kicked for science, you can play around, build new weapons, and basically blow off any currency losses until you find something that works for you.
Narratively, Sands of Aura has a very loose structure to it. It’s open world up to a point. Certain areas are inaccessible until you advance the story and complete certain quests. Outside of those narrative barriers, you can bum around on the sands, filling out your map, finding areas which you’ll almost certainly have to visit later on, and picking up loose resources which you can stash away for later use. Yet overcoming the power walls, the ability to kill mobs and finish off bosses without getting yourself brutally murdered, is perhaps a little too intimately tied up with the story. Essentially, your ability to advance the narrative is directly correlated with the strength of your gear. Far more so than it would be with any Soulsborne or Diablo-esque ARPG. As such, you’re likely to be losing sight of where the story is going with all the grinding for materials and currency. Once you’ve cleared the enemy bosses in Starspire and in your first island away from home, the story does take a turn and you gain a companion of sorts in the titular Aura.
Aura doesn’t help any in combat, but she does help fill in some backstory elements via highlighted points in maps as you explore. Thing is, aside from those interest points, we lose a lot of the story elements just by the passage of time. A lore tab, containing the comments of those who’ve spoken on a given topic, would have been a great addition to help keep story elements fresh in our minds between fights. Over the course of your travels, there are characters who will appear (and reappear) as you progress, as well as a surly lookout who sometimes gives you snippets of history when you step off your boat onto an island. There are choices you as a character can make, some of which will have decidedly permanent solutions, yet there are also some choices which are offered but which you don’t seem to be able to act upon. Again, this is where a mini-map with quest objectives would have been helpful. The end result is a story that feels like it wants to be this sweeping epic of a world on the brink, but we’re so busy trying to forge the gear we need that we lose sight of why we’re doing it. And that sucks given how good the writing is.
Historically, I have a love-hate relationship with Soulslikes at the best of times. Intricately crafted worlds and lots of secrets to dig up appeal to the writer and storyteller in me. But the often arcane systems and twitch reflexes needed generally end up turning me off. In some respects, Sands of Aura softened some of the problems I’ve had in the past with similar games. Once I got past that first power wall and had a better handle on the capabilities of my gear, I was going along pretty well till I ran face-first into the next power wall. In other respects, however, the technical flubs and the long stretches between lore bits seem to aggravate the sharp corners of the genre the devs couldn’t file down enough. It wasn’t enough to see the few people I’d ostensibly rescued show up in Starspire. The village itself seemed to not realize I was out there, the quests weren’t telling me enough story, and the environments had precious little to give me beyond loot drops to keep going. There is something endearing about Sands of Aura. But it’s not quite at the level of “compelling,” at least to me. Soulsborne fans will doubtlessly want to try it out, but temper your expectations.
Axel reviewed Sands of Aura with a code provided by the developer.
