Not surreal, exactly, but odd enough to distract from the boredom
I think my definition of ‘surreal’ is different from Aery’s. When Aery – Surreal World appeared on the Xbox Store, I was hoping that I would get to soar through Dali-esque landscapes, awestruck by the huge, abstract structures that I was swooping through. Melting clocks and giant ears – that sort of thing. Maybe – and this was always a big ask – the surrealism would stretch to the gameplay, too. This could be the first Aery game that asked me to do something different from simply flying around.
Aery and I are a little distant from each other in terms of what ‘surreal’ means. There is one level that takes place in a city where it’s always raining. That’s less surreal to me, and more like my life in the East Midlands from roughly October-April. One level shows three civilisations who incorporate nature into their city-planning in different ways, while another is basically a vampiric castle. They’re less surreal and more ‘varied’, I suppose.
You don’t have to be odd to fly here, but it helps
To give Aery – Surreal World credit, there are some levels that stray into ‘odd’. My favourite is a space station covered in plush toys. Apparently, plush toys often dream about becoming astronauts, and this is where they go once they’ve been abandoned. It’s an unusual pitch for Toy Story 6, but we could see it working. Another has a stinky whale being washed by water cannons. We’re no scientists, but we don’t think that water cannons or ‘stinkiness’ are much of a thing under water.
This is the spectrum you are dealing with in Aery – Surreal World. Less surreal and more quirky. But rather than get overly cynical about the semantics, we appreciate that Aery is at least taking us to new places. We have seen all of these levels before, sure, but they are at least being shown from a different viewpoint. If I am going to fly a bird around levels that I recognise, I at least want to be spotting plush toys along the way.
Outside of the levels, Aery – Surreal World is very much the traditional Aery template. There are eleven levels here, and each of them hands you control of a bird (a corvid of some kind, this time out). Your task is to collect a chain of feathers through the level, with each feather materialising once the previous one is caught. You are gently soaring through picturesque landscapes, pointing the beak of your bird at the next feather in the chain.
A chill game for the end of the day
The tempo is as first-gear and calm as you can possibly imagine. The only tensions come from when you lose your place in the chain of feathers. But this happens so rarely (you can just backtrack and try a different path or angle) that it’s barely worth mentioning. This is about as cozy as video gaming can get.
There is a problem, though. More so than other Aery games, Aery – Surreal World invites a little boredom inside. There are a lot of feathers to find in each level, and I would be surprised if this doesn’t have the highest feather count in any Aery game. One level asks you to find 92, which is exceptionally high. The result is that you’re spending – comparatively – a lot of time on each level. I would say that it’s too long: there’s not enough variety in the landscapes to reward that much time spent. I felt my heart sink whenever I picked up the first feather and saw a tally that was over 60.
The story in Aery games is often terrible, but the narrative here at least gets out of the way of the gameplay. There are only three or four dialogue snippets per level, where the narrator tries to explain the oddnesses that you experience. They’re necessary context, even if they are speckled with typos and grammatical issues. It’s fun listening to the robotic voice try to say some of them. At one point, the word ‘flood’ is misspelled as ‘floow’, and the narrator ties themselves in knots trying to say it (yep, there aren’t any actual humans doing voiceovers in Aery – Surreal World).
Lacking the turbulence of other Aery games
Another common issue with Aery games is bugs. But Aery – Surreal World is refreshingly free of them. There are no invisible walls to crash into; no achievements that refuse to pop. It’s an area where EpiXR Games have made real headway, and it doesn’t feel like a crapshoot whenever you play an Aery game on launch day anymore.
All of these ups and downs leave Aery – Surreal World nestled in the middle of the pack. The ‘surreal’ levels are welcome, offering a fun twist on the level-retreads. There are the same old Viking, castle and city levels, but they’re given a touch of zest through some odd inclusions, like moving them underwater.
But the surrealism is undermined by feather-counts that are extremely high. You’re swooping through levels for a long, long time, and the refreshing levels start to go stale. I would have happily traded the longer levels for more levels, but EpiXR Games would undoubtedly suck through its teeth and say that approach costs too much.
One swoop forward, one swoop back. It’s the Aery way: making some genuine improvements to the Aery formula, only to make things worse somewhere else. It averages out to mean Aery – Surreal World is an Aery game that is middling: quirky in its levels, but tiresome in its efforts to make the game longer.
Important Links
Aery – Surreal World Invites Xbox Players Into Its Strangest Flight Yet – https://www.thexboxhub.com/aery-surreal-world-invites-xbox-players-into-its-strangest-flight-yet/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/aery-surreal-world/9pfb3zfcpr33
