Aeruta is an action-platformer baking-sim game where you play as a cute fox girl. That is pretty much the sentence that sold me on trying this game out; I had no idea what to really make of it, and the pictures looked appealing, so when I got the chance to review this game for the blog, I jumped right in.
Curiously looking at the Steam storefront for the game to see what I'm up for, I saw the adorable-looking sprite-work for the game, and the... honestly, quite abysmal description. The description is filled with mistranslations, doesn't really explain the game well at all, and doesn't really do the game any favors. Not the greatest first impression, I must say.
So what actually is Aeruta? Well, in Aeruta you play Chaya, a fox adventurer in training. Chaya was sent by the Adventurers' Guild on a trial mission to retrieve the titular Aeruta Crystals, and in doing so, she can finally become a full-fledged Adventurer and achieve her dream.
On her way to the location, she becomes hungry and follows her nose to a run-down bakery in the middle of nowhere. Deciding to touch the oven at the exact wrong time, the oven explodes, and Chaya ends up having to help run the bakery in order to not have the little bear girl who runs it, named Effie, go bankrupt right before her grand opening.
Exploration, Dungeons, and Combat:
So now that we've established the main premise, how does Aeruta actually play? Well, the gameplay is divided into mostly two parts: Exploring Rogue-lite dungeons, and running the bakery, with the option of small town exploration shortly before deciding on which route to take.
During town exploration, you can chat and give gifts to characters you've encountered in the story, in order to unlock special scenes with them that reveal more about them, you can upgrade the town for a cost, you can upgrade your skills and stats, upgrade your weapons, buy materials to use in the bakery, buy badges that will give you special abilities and conditions during your runs, and raise a monster pet. Most of these are locked by progression in the story, though.
The first actual part of gameplay is running Rogue-lite dungeons; short action platforming rooms ranging in difficulty, but all pre-made, in which your objective is to get to the end of the room, while beating every single monster in said room. Miss a monster, which is honestly quite hard to do, and the door will be locked for you when you reach it.
When you finish a room, you can choose between several winding paths, with some rooms being harder but give more rewards, a room that's just a single treasure chest with a big number of materials, a room that will let you obtain a large number of dough - which will let you unlock and upgrade your breads, and a room that will have more breakable objects, which drop materials exclusive to them - such as wood or plants.
When you start a run, you will be able to pick a weapon between three options - a Rolling Pin, a Whip, and a Rapier - each with slight, but quite minor, alterations to play-style, up to three badges - which unlocks as you upgrade the town - and a bread that you can take with you from the ones you unlocked and levelled up.
Every bread you take can heal you by pressing LB, with limited uses, and with each bread having a different effect; from raising your damage, to reducing the damage you take, to healing more but having a chance to just flat out not heal at all.
During combat, you have several tools at your disposal; a normal 4-hit combo, and three unlockable skills for each weapon, each one doing more damage, but having their own cooldown. You also have a non-spammable dash that leaves you invincible during its animation.
The reason I make sure to mention that it's non-spammable is because it leaves a lot to be desired. Enemy hits do not give you invincibility frames, and using the dash at the wrong time more often than not leave you getting hit. That's less of a problem during 1-on-1 boss fights, where everything is telegraphed rather well, and every mistake is your own fault. During normal stages, however, where you can get swarmed by several enemies, it can lead to unavoidable damage to the player.
During stages, there are also breakable objects you can... well, break, which give extra materials. The problem is that they more often than not just seem like part of the background, with the only thing differentiating them being a faded glow that can easily be missed. It's something that I found myself getting used to the more I played, but it did leave me annoyed quite a bit at the start of my playthrough.
On some runs, you can see the mark of a character in a room on the map. Go to that room, and you can see the character standing there. Talk to them, and you get the option to share your bread with them, which will take up one heal from you. Do so, and you can get a material in return, as well as raise their affinity for you, and sometimes even raise your health for the rest of the run.
And speaking of sharing your bread, the final thing you can do in a run is capturing monsters. Each stage will have its own unique monsters, and some of those will be bread-slime-like monsters. Unlockable behind story-progression, you can offer them your bread, and if they eat it, they will join you in your bakery. Once there, you can feed them, raise them, send them to gather materials, and let them help you when you run your bakery.
Owning a Bakery:
The second part of this action-platformer baking-sim is, of course, actually running your bakery. Instead of going exploring in dungeons, you can instead open up the bakery to the public, and start selling bread.
In order to open up the bakery, you need to use the materials that you gather while exploring, and each day may have its own popular type of bread. Each bread will have its own number of how many loaves are made per stack, and how much each one cost. The cost is raised during days where the bread is popular. You start out by barely having any racks to sell different types of bread, but you will gain more as you build up your bakery.
Alongside having to choose which bread to sell, you can also ask for help from one of the friends you made; if a story character's affinity for you has reached level 1, they can be asked to help you in the bakery. They won't really actively help you, but they give give different helpful effects, like raising the price of bread, making more bread, complete randomness, and so on.
On top of that, remember the monsters you've been capturing? You can assign them to one of three jobs - cleaning, stacking food, and attending the cash register. You will have to pay each one 5% of your profits at the end, though, because... I have no idea what they use the money for, actually, but I guess monsters you have to feed have to be given a paycheck, too.
So what do you actually do when you open the bakery? Well, you do three main things that everyone who has ever worked in retail just loves: stack shelves, clean, and tend the cash register, all on your own, and all at the same time.
Every time a rack is empty and there are still materials left to use to make the needed bread, Effie will create bread. Your simple job during that time is to take the bread she makes to the racks and put them there. You can only hold so many bread types at once, and Effie can only have so many bread types ready before she'll wait for you, as well as customers not being able to buy what's not there, so fill up the shelves quickly. The bread is also so fresh, it will sometimes run away from you, so you can't rest on your laurels.
The next thing you have to do is tend to the cash register. As the customers pick up bread they want to buy, they go to the register and wait. Your job here is to go to the register, do a quick Simon-Says mini-game and release them before they grow tired of waiting and just go away without buying anything. Do that quickly enough, and you'll get a nice tip for your effort. An option to completely skip that part but get significantly less tips can be unlocked by upgrading the bakery.
And the final part is making sure the bakery is clean. During each shift, customers will drop junk in the bakery. Clean up said junk, and you'll get both a small popularity boost, and a coin that you can use to buy accessories for your pets.
A shift at the bakery entails juggling all three of those parts, and doing so quickly and efficiently. The shift runs on a timer, and once the timer runs out, Effie will stop making bread. Finish selling all the bread that has been made, and you will receive both the money that was earned during the shift, as well as experience points for the bread that you sold during your shift.
Please note that this is the only way to make money in the game, and you will need quite a bit of it in order to unlock most things. The bakery gameplay is not something you can easily avoid doing during a run. In fact, with one of the bosses serving as a hard-damage check, and the need to spend money to raise stats and skill points to unlock and increase skills, I don't really think it's possible at all to avoid doing it.
Overall, I quite enjoyed the bakery gameplay. It can get quite hectic, especially when selling several kinds of bread that have a daily boost, and it honestly does remind me of working holiday shifts in retail; having to juggle so many things, and still have to release customers rapidly and efficiently in order to make the most during a shift can feel quite intense, but rewarding.
Eventually, as you unlock more bread to sell and upgrade the bread you have been selling, you gain skill points, which you can use to unlock skills for each weapons. Each weapon has its own skills, but they all unlock the same number of skill points; that means that if you have unlocked 10 skill points in one, you have also unlocked 10 skill points in the other two. That makes sure the player doesn't completely ditch the other two weapons for the one they initially picked.
With the money you earn, you can pretty much do everything I explained above you can do in the town. Which leads to my second issue with the game. Your stats are raised by spending money, those being Strength, Health, and Luck. Strength affect your attack point, Health affects your... well, health, and Luck affects how many materials you gain from monsters. They all start at level 1, but can be raised up to level 9 using money.
Pros and Cons:
I have found that the game has a major issue with balancing once you reach a certain point; some of the bosses gave me major trouble, and so once I reached the third set of levels, I decided to grind a bit and raise my Strength and Health from level 4 to level 7, not even to the max, just to make sure I don't get stuck too hard. And along with one specific badge, which makes normal monsters not attack you until attacked, I kinda broke the game.
The dungeons became quite easy to complete, and the bosses, paired with up to five heals by the time I got to that point, became sort of a joke to beat. Even the final boss ended up not putting too much of a fight. You later on unlock harder stages, where you can't see the full map before picking which stages you want to go to, but the stages just became kinda repetitive and same-y at that point as I already knew them by heart, and I found myself going through the motion.
The thing that kept me engaged all throughout and made me want to see things to the end, though, was the story.
The story is fairly simple, all things considered. An adventurer (in training) getting into debt and wanting to help a new-found friend, while still clearing her obligations. The characters are well-written, the dialogue put a smile on my face more than once, and I ended up quite enjoying the small, but unique cast of misfits.
While I have been specifically asked not to spoil the ending, not that I would have even had I not been asked, it was pretty much something I could already see coming from about 25% into the game. The story may not be the most original I've seen, but it was quite beautiful and heart-warming in its simplicity.
I am also pleased to report that the translation for the story is, thankfully, much better than the one the store page description has received. I unfortunately did find several typos in the dialogue here in there, but overall, the translation was good, and the dialogue was well-written, compared to the store page's description.
Chaya is genuine and good-hearted to a fault, rushing into things to try and help others without really thinking things through, and it leads to some silly, but tender moments that just put a smile on my face.
My biggest issue with the game's story is that a big part of it remains unexplained. You are told about things in the story that have apparently already happened but are never detailed. There is a character that plays a major role in the story but is never actually properly introduced. There's an unresolved plot-point with a powerful bread that's never really made. You hear about a war that has happened and was the start of everything that happens in the game, but outside of some references to it, you don't really get to learn about it.
Another thing I'd like to note is the music. The music is, quite simply, really good. It honestly reminded me a lot of the vibes of Maple Story, giving each stage its own unique feel, that just beckons for the player to go and explore, see what it has to offer. There's not a single track I can say is bad.
The problem is that... they don't always fit. Especially during character affinity cut-scenes, where they simply play the character's theme. Chiva, for example, is a knight who is questioning her role as a knight, and her scenes can get quite heavy, but her theme is relatively cheery. That made for a powerful dissonance between the tone of the dialogue and the tone of the music, and I honestly didn't know how to feel.
I do not think I need to comment on the graphics of the game. The game is quite beautiful. From the characters, to the stages, to the items and the town environment, everything is made to be incredibly adorable and appealing.
As for the end-game, and that's the part that left me the most disappointed... there is none, really. The game so wants you to continue playing it. Several parts of the game don't unlock until you beat the final boss, such as the final scene with every character, or the final unlocks to the town. But there's just... nothing beyond that.
I so wanted to be able to continue with the game, as I truly feel it managed to get something very special right, but with the only thing left is to 100% the game for the very sake of it, I just found that I'll start to resent it if I continue on, and I didn't want that to happen. I loved my time with the game, and didn't want to sour myself on it by grinding it out. I can just hope they add more in the future.
Should you play it?
Aeruta is truly a gem of a game; with a heart-warming story, a silly but adorable cast of characters, and a unique gameplay experience that has the player juggle running a bakery with running Rogue-lite dungeons. Finishing it was truly a joy.
I found problems with its balancing, its lack of post-game, and several unexplained plot points, but whenever I left it, I honestly just wished I could go back to it. It's not a long romp, but while it lasts, it constantly has that 'just one more run' feel.
Review Copy was Provided
Post a Comment