Creatures of Ava review — Well traveled roads

Creatures of Ava lays all of its cards on the table within its first few minutes. You are Vic, and alongside your partner Tabitha you’ve been tasked by the company you work for to evacuate the planet of Ava, saving as many life forms as possible before the Withering consumes the world. Of course, the sapient inhabitants, the Na’am, are reluctant to leave but they won’t say why, and they don’t seem phased by the Withering. You might be able to tell exactly where the game is going to go from that brief description of the setup, but the fun is supposed to be in the journey. Right?

Creatures of Ava has some promising ideas, but never explores them on a deeper than surface level. The tutorial introduces you to all the game’s mechanics, including wildlife photography, stealth, an instrument to communicate with animals, and a staff called the Nafitar to manipulate the environment and cure small parts of the Withering. I never used stealth again after it was introduced, photography seems totally optional outside of some side quests, and playing music boils down to a tedious simon says minigame.

The Nafitar is the most interesting of the lot, facilitating the game’s non-violent combat system. Some creatures you’ll encounter have been infected, and you can cure them by connecting a magical tether to them until their health bar is depleted. The creatures will attack you while you do this, inflicting damage and status effects like poison or blind, and you can dodge or jump to avoid some of these attacks. I say some because later on in the game combat becomes essentially a DPS race, with attacks coming out so quickly and with so little warning it’s impossible to dodge them. The Nafitar has additional spells and powers you acquire along the way, but three out of four of these stop working on enemies after a certain point. Instead, to get through combat, you’ll want to constantly be chugging health restoring potions

There is a little bit of strategy in combat, however. When tethered to a creature, if another creature comes in contact with the tether they’ll be affected too, allowing you to cure multiple creatures at once. By investing in the perk tree, you can chain a (theoretically) infinite number of creatures together and have all of them affected by your spells. This made for a few cool moments, but usually I preferred to focus on one creature at a time because of the camera. The lock-on is only capable of focusing on a single creature, making it common for others in your tether to go off screen and knock you down. You can disengage the lock-on and control the camera manually, but that leaves your thumb on the right stick and not on the dodge or jump buttons.

Combat is often required to progress and to get animals to help you solve puzzles. You can control any animal using your flute, but they need to be friendly first. To get them on your side, you either play the aforementioned simon says minigame or cure them of their infection. After that they’ll follow you around while you play (Vic’s theme goes along with the background music of each area, which is very cool), and then you can aim at them to take control for a time. Each animal type has abilities like being able to push large blocks, remove plant barriers, or knock down bridges. You can more easily see these abilities by taking a picture of the creature, but as far as I can tell not doing so doesn’t prevent you from using the ability.

Sadly these abilities just feel like matching keys to locks, and the game doesn’t really require any sort of critical thinking or puzzle solving to progress. The same goes for Nafitar spells. You have a levitate spell, a slow spell, a shield that prevents environmental damage, and a spell that drains infection quicker and is required to heal infections with yellow bars, but all of these abilities feel separate and have very specific places you need to use them. For example, you’ll know to use the shield when you see weird mushrooms on the ground and start taking damage near them, the platforms you can levitate are all exactly the same, and you only use slow on a type of door that normally grows vines when you get close. The faster healing spell you use on basically everything constantly, which gives it the opposite problem of all the other spells. It’s far too multi-purpose, making it annoying to constantly be casting.

There is one instance in which you do combine two powers, the levitate and slow spells, but it’s through needing to use the exact same platform and door immediately after each other. That’s as far as the puzzle solving ever goes, and while that example is still very light the game really could have used more moments like it.

Maybe Creatures of Ava isn’t focused on puzzle solving though, and is more about exploring the world, experiencing the story, and collecting creatures? Ava is absolutely stunning visually, with a gorgeous art style and unique biomes that offer a variety of environments to explore. I feel like I’ve seen these types of “alien” locals in other sci-fi stories, like a dense forest but everything is purple or a desert with ancient ruins and constant sand storms, but pretty is pretty. The character and creature designs are nice too, Vic’s got some great style that gives you the sense she’s an explorer and not terribly keen on company uniforms. The Naam look appropriately alien, while still human enough to read their expressions. Most of the animals do take inspiration from one or more real life creatures, making them a bit more forgettable, but the ones that look like giant ladybugs are cute as a button.

In each area you visit, you are tasked with rescuing a certain number of each type of creature before you can progress to the next location. This is a neat idea, but there’s not much of a reason to continue rescuing after you meet the minimum, other than experience points. It’s super easy to meet that minimum too, as I hit it in every area before even getting to their respective Naam villages. Just explore for a few minutes and you’re done. More experience really isn’t worth it either. There’s a skill tree, but I never found any of the skills on it to be worth pursuing. It feels like the rest of the mechanics, completely disconnected and disparate from each other.

As I said in the opening paragraph, the story is nothing to write home about. It’s going to go exactly where you think it is and no further. I was hoping Vic would have to really immerse herself in Naam culture to learn about the cycle of nature and respecting someone’s wishes even if you don’t agree, but nope; she is straight up told the game’s main message and then it ends. The game is bookended by some gorgeous, animated cutscenes with some good voice acting, but I wouldn’t say they’re worth going through the rest of the story to see. I think the game has some good ideas, but none of them reach their full potential.

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