Image via Nautilus Games
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I wish Everdeep Aurora wasn’t so frustrating to play. It’s a beautiful little game, with charming characters, a fascinating concept, and interesting idea. But because of the lack of simple quality of life features like tutorials or a more conducive save system, your journey into the depths can be quite cumbersome.
Shell is a tiny cat waiting for her mother aboveground. Meteors are hammering the planet. All she has is a letter suggesting they meet at their place. After a kind frog named Ribbert offers an old drill to dig to safety, the kitten heads into the depths to find her mom, potentially assisting other people along the way.
Like many digging games, such as Steamworld Dig and Mr Driller, Shell’s goal is to continually head into the depths to reunite with her missing mom. You start out with a basic drill with two batteries. However, by digging through certain materials, exploring certain areas, and taking on quests after talking to other denizens of the deep, you can get extra equipment or necessary fuels to dig further down. Charging stations come up at spot, which allow you to turn gems into energy for the drill. Also, as there aren’t really enemies to deal with, it’s more of a leisurely descent.
The problem is, there are no explanations whatsoever in Everdeep Aurora. So while the game looks incredibly charming and features some fun interactions with NPCs, you’re left lost. There are no tutorials whatsoever. How do you work the drill? Experiment and find out. How do you recharge it? I hope you instinctively went through blocks with red flecks in them, then happened across a charging machine. What about upgrades or ways to go forward? Or getting a map? Saving your game? Figuring out fishing? If you don’t drill down in the right direction, good luck with that.
Inventory management is awkward too. You do so by moving left and right through everything in the left box with the D-pad. If there’s a note, you then also need to press up and down to read through everything. I’d have killed for a proper menu by the end of the game when Shell had a lot of stuff on-hand.
The thing is, there are times when those quality of life additions felt sorely needed. There’s no explanation about how to save at any point in the game. You only discover it if you happen upon a campsite and tent when going through the underground area. This means if you made significant progress and, say, the game crashes on your Switch, you can lose lots of work. Or maybe you go into an area and find the wall jump location doesn’t give you enough of a lift to actually reach a certain platform. You might be trapped, with no way to go forward or back, and need to accept that you’ll start back with lots of progress lost to get to that point again next time. I could even understand foregoing the ability to save anywhere, but an autosave when you enter a doorway would be sorely appreciated.
Which is odd because in other ways, Everdeep Aurora is considerate. You can set the size of the font. (That’s a godsend on the Switch in handheld mode.) You can have Ribbert come and get you if you’re trapped. However, that only applies to certain areas in the depths. Though the color scheme is limited, it’s incredibly crisp and easy to ready through everything.
I love the concept behind Everdeep Aurora, as the design direction is flawless, but it can also be quite a cumbersome game. The lack of quality of life features really hurt it. If there were some tutorials or perhaps a better save system, I’d feel a lot more comfortable recommending the game. But as is, I’d really only recommend it if you enjoy savoring in-game aesthetics and really meandering through a world working out everything on your own.
Everdeep Aurora is available for the Switch and PC.
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Everdeep Aurora
An ongoing apocalyptic meteor shower has forced the world’s population to settle underground. As Shell, a feline child who awakens to find her mother missing, drill downward from the surface layer through a tile-based underground and discover the Everdeep. Switch version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.
I love the concept behind Everdeep Aurora, as the design direction is flawless, but it can also be quite a cumbersome game.
