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.
Towers of AghasbaPublisher: Dreamlit Inc.Developer: Dreamlit Inc.Platform: Played on PCAvailability: Out today in early access for PC (Steam) and PS5
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 things.