Aria's Story

Hello everybody! It's been more than a year ago since I last reviewed (or played) a game on this site so I decided to play and review this new game (as of today). I played the Spanish version, by the way.



The gameplay is your usual RM adventure game stuff: Solve puzzles and tests to get items to solve other puzzles to get keys to solve more puzzles to get the necessary key to advance to the next area. Not impressive, but at least it works.
However, let's remember that this is a game marked as "horror". Most developers would just cram the game with tons of trial-and-error puzzles with game over scary images in an very cheap attempt to make a scary horror game. Thankfully, this game's not the case. There are some trial-and-error puzzles, but since there's a reasonable logic behind every puzzle and all of them are pretty easy to solve with some thinking, getting a game over due to failing a puzzle is uncommon (also, not all of them will give you a game over due to failure).
So basically, it's nothing new, but it's all fair game, so it's enjoyable to play.
By the way, the game's free of glitches/bugs. I only found one typo (remember: in the Spanish version), that's all.



The game page says this game's inspired by Ib, and heck it's true. I even ended up with the same scare ratio: lots at the beginning, none at the end (well, Ib still kept some scariness due to some events). This fact doesn't make the game less enjoyable, but if there was a tag in this site called "horroresque" I would put this game under it instead, since the scariness wears off pretty quickly after going through the first zone even if there are still horror elements playing out (like random blood appearing and some creepy happenings/deaths). Basically, the game wanted to keep itself pretty despite all the horror, and that killed the creepiness.
Regardless of how non-scary I found the game, I really loved the graphics and music. The maps were well made (not too big, not too tiny), the tilesets used make that library world look gorgeous and the music is pretty good too. The character designs and mugshots were clean and nice to look at, so yeah, you can tell I really loved the artistic department.



I must start saying THANKS TO THE CREATOR for not giving me any of these two elements that I've seen many times in RM games:

• A goody-two-shoes main character too good and pure to use their brain
• Complete, absolute amnesia in which the character doesn't even remember their own name

Seriously, thanks.
My problem with those two tropes isn't that they're overused. It's that they're often used in a bad or unoriginal way, with horrible results. But I won't get into some discourse right now, the point is that I'm satisfied. Anyway, let's get to the point:
At first the story of this game is very very similar to Ib's (MC goes to a place, something seemingly innocuous happens to MC, MC is transported to a weird and creepy version of the place they went to, from which they gotta escape). It even contains colour-coded characters you find along the way. However, this is where the similarities end, since the game becomes its own thing and shows its true story. And tbh, I really liked this story.
This game uses the system of "giving mysteries to the plot and practically not give a single tip to solve them or guess what they're about it until you reach a certain point and reveal everything", and it's done well. Every allusion to plot-relevant points make total sense once you know what the entire story's about and who the characters are. It isn't a jaw-dropping story, but it's a satisfying and pleasant one, and most importantly, it makes sense, and I love it when stories make sense.
And about the characters: I liked all of them, even the ones that have almost no spotlight. It's been a long time since I genuinely cared about the main character: Aria's sweet but not dumb, and even if it looks like she gets distracted with stuff sometimes, she's set on leaving the weird library world. It was really satisfying to play as her: it's basically how you should make a character trapped in a bad place that's supposed to be sweet and caring. Very likeable.

What follows is hidden since it's spoilery. Read at your own risk.



You can see I really liked this game. I don't have much else to say since this is a small game (I took 3h and 45 minutes to finish the game and get 2 different endings -the neutral and true ones), but the fact that it's pretty short helps it to not overstay its welcome.