I spent much of this morning throwing fruit at a little hippo. Sometimes the hippopotamus ate the fruit, which was what I intended. Sometimes the fruit was lost and rolled and lost forever. Sometimes, very occasionally, I would press the wrong button and eat the fruit myself. It's really a hassle, because the fruit is quite difficult to pick and store.
Welcome to Towers of Aghasba, a new indie survival game where you lead a group of characters trying to rebuild their community on an unstable island. I've been playing it for most of the morning and 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 types of materials. You build villages and improve them. You take care of the biomes by planting magical trees. You explore and observe animals, feed them and hunt them. You swim, climb, dive and slide. It goes on and on, and it's only just begun in Early Access.
I think he's tough but good-natured. The movement is a bit weightless and the camera is too fast to turn. It's a cheerful buggy: at one point I went fishing for fish and was delighted, if confused, to find them swimming in the air just above a lake. Rough Edges, Early Access. But within moments of the start of the shipwreck, I was already swimming, gathering supplies, and also preparing for my new home. I gathered sticks, stones and pieces of grass to keep the craft going. I chose an area for that first village and planted that first tree. I met a group of elders who sent me on different missions, all of them standing comfortably on rocky outcrops looking towards the horizon like the wanderer above the sea of fog. They gave me rudimentary combat tutorials and animal watching tools to build a sort of Pokédex. Most of all they made me angry doing things.
There are already many things to do in Towers of Aghasba. After a morning with the game, I'd say it's pretty focused on doing. And that's fine. This is a great game to dive into, not with a set plan, but with an empty period of time to fill. I load it up and say, let's give this fifteen minutes. Then I see what you need doing – how many trees need to be planted, how many animals need to be fed, how much dung needs to be collected (which in turn requires feeding the animals) and if there is anything new you can create to make life easier. I mean it in the best way: Towers of Aghasba is very good at madness, and I'll take it.
But at some point this morning I got a little bored of everything 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 little team at Dreamlit is building. The starting island is not particularly large and much of it looks like an area burned by a forest fire. But I found a rock with character to climb (the climbing and sliding system is straight out of Zelda, with the same type of stamina meter) and better yet, halfway up I found broken steps chiseled into the surface of the stone. I continued on, 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 ancient ruins. It felt like a personal discovery, just the kind of thing you look forward to on a break from busy work.
Inevitably, once I explored the ruins I discovered that they were tempting me to return to doing again. More items to create, more resources to gather. But that's fine, I think. At its core, I think Towers of Aghasba is interested in balance: building the village but also tending to the biome tree, hunting the animals but also learning to feed them and let them grow, and whether it can balance a bit of solitary wandering with the simple pleasures of watching the piles of resources accumulate, I think I'll be quite happy.
A copy of Towers of Aghasba was provided by developer Dreamlit Inc.