Creatures of Ava Review: A Beautiful, Doomed Journey Of The Familiar & The New

is a familiar kind of creature-collecting game with a more than a few unique twists. It's the second development effort by Inverge Studios, the developer behind the action platformer, but with the bonus addition of 11 bit Studios (,, ) behind it. But is entirely different from anything else in either studio's repertoire. In fact, despite wearing its inspirations on its sleeve, is unlike any other game in recent memory.

stars Victoria «Vic» Hamilton, an environmental scientist working for an intergalactic corporation. Her mission: to save the dying planet Ava from a little-understood, rapidly spreading infection called "," by evacuating as much of its flora and fauna as possible before it consumes them all. And that's just what the player spends most of their time doing:solving simple, yet elegant puzzles by charming and controlling animals, and eventually zapping them into space. It all amounts to a very ambitious game that balances innovation with familiarity, even while it suffers from issues with pacing and polish.

is primarily a story-focused game, butits gameplay meshes perfectly with its plot to create an immersive, moving tale. After landing on Ava, Vic discovers a sort of magic wand, the Nafitar, that she uses in a form of non-violent combat to cure enraged creatures and clear pockets of infection. She can then charm them by playing the flute, recruiting their help in solving puzzles before leading them to designated evacuation sites and beaming them up. But there's more to this effort than it seems, and a terrible truth soon emerges.

Indika is a wholly original, grimly surreal, confrontationally dark adventure game, as awkward as it is sublime.

It's ultimately a subversion of a colonialist narrative: the technologically-advanced humans believe they're the only hope for Ava, but are eventually foiled by the Naam's innate understanding of the life cycle. Its story isn't the most groundbreaking, and its final twist is pretty predictable. But it's solid, and