If Aery – Heaven & Hell is to be believed, Heaven and Hell aren’t too dissimilar from each other. One’s coloured white and is littered with angel statues, while the other is black and has a love for skull decorations. But they’re both a mishmash of ruins and floating islands, with scattered stuff from back home on Earth. There’s a Heaven with pizza tossed about, and there’s a Hell with pizza tossed about. Maybe there’s pineapple on Hell’s pizza.
Variety has always been Aery’s weak spot. Levels are shared between Aery titles, and even within an Aery game, the same levels and decorations are reused. It’s enough to get the odd eye roll, as the laziness breaks the immersion. And when Aery is effectively a sightseeing simulator, albeit as a parrot, and the sights are the same on each level, then the experience is critically hit. And so it goes with Aery – Heaven & Hell.
At first, we were kind of taken with this iteration of the series. Over the many, many Aery games the graphical fidelity has improved, and the crispness makes the vistas genuinely quite pretty, in their own polygonal way. Gliding through sprawling versions of Heaven and Hell, even if they are oddly translated into messy rooms, is relaxing and easy on the eye. We found the slippers being kicked off and the legs going up onto the coffee table.
But from level five or six, we had Aery – Heaven & Hell’s number. As mentioned right there at the start, Heaven and Hell don’t feel like they’re in sharp contrast. They’re much of a muchness, and you’ll be swooping through plenty of doughnut rings before idling around ruined columns, as both of them have them.
Then there’s the shared stuff from other Aery games. We’ve played and pretty much reviewed them all, and it’s part of the territory: you’re going to be playing levels from the other games. There’s a slight positive here, in that levels aren’t included wholesale. But they are instead chopped up and placed higgledy-piggledy in the usual Heaven and Hell frame. It’s stuff we know, but remixed.
Which creates pieces that simply don’t fit. In the latter parts of the game, Viking longboats and longhalls are incorporated, as if it makes any sense at all. If the story had set the scene, talking about alternate Heavens like Valhalla, then it would have fit like a glove. But the story is at pains to talk about ‘human progress’, as if Vikings are the emblem of it. It’s a huge reach.
Story has never been Aery’s forte. It’s more irritating than normal in Aery – Heaven & Hell. First, there are the whacking great title cards, chock full of text, that you can’t skip and have to wait patiently for the voice actor to finish. If it had anything of value to say then it might have got a pass, but it’s wishy-washy rubbish. Michael Owen would have thought it was all a bit obvious: children are innocent and enjoy playing with toys, while older people like food and spend too much time playing games. These are excuses for finding certain elements in Heaven and Hell, but that’s all they are. They’re obstructive, long excuses that we’d rather weren’t there. One day, Aery will get story right. We can’t help imagine a descent into the rings of Hell, or a re-telling of Paradise Lost perhaps, which both would have been improvements, but we get a thimble of preachiness instead.
Aery – Heaven & Hell isn’t all wrong turns though. We went back to play the very first Aery, just to see how far things had come – and the difference was night and day. That first game had annoying hub levels, bleached out graphics, hidden feathers that take far too long to find, and a feeling of tension where meditation should be. We complain about how little the Aery games innovate, but it’s clear that the gameplay, at the very least, has come along in bounds.
In Aery – Heaven & Hell, you don’t hunt around for feathers that are placed in the hardest to reach crannies. Instead, they are created in a chain, so all you have to do is spot the next one and move the beak of your parrot into its general direction. You do this thirty or forty-odd times and the level is clear, without any concern around where the last feather is. It’s a format that plays to the series’ strengths as a chill, cosy game.
And everything looks so polished. We’ve gone through Aery games that weren’t optimised for the Series X|S; ones that were too dark or too bright; and others with odd glitches floating in the sky. But, with the small exception of some seams in the sky, Aery – Heaven & Hell is nigh-on perfect. It looks fine and dandy.
Some habits are hard to lose, though, and bugs have always been a problem for the series. We’ve often pinned it on the super-fast cadence of releases. We get an Aery every couple of months or so, and that can’t be enough time for the QA team to be confident that it’s working properly. In Aery – Heaven & Hell, there is a bug, but it’s not game breaking this time. In the Gluttony level, the final two feathers aren’t where they should be. In fact, they’re right back at the start of the level, which means you have to complete the chain and hunt for the final two that are leagues away. It breaks the game’s rule of having feathers next to each other, and makes you wonder whether the level is completable at all.
Aery – Heaven & Hell ends up in neither Heaven or Hell. It’s snugly in Limbo. Just as we thought we were going to soar up to the Pearly Gates with some high-fidelity visuals and pressure-free objectives, we come crashing back down with repeated levels, shoddy storytelling and a frustrating bug on level nine. It’s the same old story for the flawed series, then, and we can only hope things improve for the next Aery release, which will no doubt be soon.
