Review: Everdeep Aurora

A cute little exploration game with no combat. Short and sweet, but also a bit obtuse and backtracking heavy.

Everdeep Aurora is initially fun to dig around and explore in this digging-centric highly vertical exploration story game. I heard it was a Metroidvania, but honestly it’s so linear and there’s almost no meaningful upgrades… and the map is actually just “radar” and the underground earthquakes mean things slightly change location on you all the time.

It felt Souls-like in the evocative dialogue and implications about a larger, dying world… which was an interesting contrast to the large variety of cute animal characters.

I wanted to talk to everyone and help them out, but tons of backtracking and mediocre platforming made the game drag on a bit.

I almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten the true ending to this game without a guide. It’s not especially hard, but I had run out of patience for the slow exploration in this game. The endings were all fine, but leave most details open to interpretation. I don’t want a Lord of the Rings ass ending, but I was hoping to get a little bit more from this game in the writing department. The vibes, however, are great.

I want to stress that this game is super cute and interesting… but I wanted a bit more game and a bit less tedium.