Ary and the Secret of Seasons (PC) Preview

Looking at eXiin’s forthcoming new release, Ary and the Secret of Seasons, feels like stumbling into a three-way marriage between Disney, Studio Ghibli, and the Legend of Zelda franchise. I mean that as a definite positive. My early look at the demo provided by the developers ran full with nostalgia, while also having enough new and creative aspects to offer to keep the game from feeling stale or derivative.

Ary and the Secret of Seasons is a puzzle platformer with RPG elements in which you play as Aryelle, or Ary. She is a young girl who stumbles into a newly challenging role as the first girl to join the Guardians of Seasons, an organization responsible for protecting the world, Valdi, in which she lives. The role of Guardian is usually handed down from father to son. However, with Ary’s brother missing and her father mired in grief, she takes on the mantle of Guardian of Winter in their stead when the seasons are suddenly thrown sharply out of balance in her wintry town of Yule.

Admittedly, the demo doesn’t necessarily explain much of this context upon first entry. If you feel thrown in the deep end at first, don’t worry; I did too. I’m confident that the game will unpack the rest of this lore in full once all the content is at our fingertips. In the meantime, though, Ary and the Secret of Seasons is characterized by charming graphics and voice acting, a beautiful soundtrack, and impressively smooth gameplay. These elements are aided along by easy to master, intuitive controls, whether you’re using a mouse and keyboard or a controller. Though you play as a child protagonist, what I’ve seen of the game so far offers more than enough intrigue and challenge to keep the game from ever feeling childish. Ary herself is smart, charming, and easy to invest in.

On a mechanical level, Ary and the Secret of Seasons has a lot to offer, too. The core puzzling mechanic — using progressively unlockable powers to change and rearrange parts of Ary’s surrounding environment — encourages experimentation, and trial and error. Overall it offers a creative and engaging approach to the puzzle platformer genre. The game also provides players with the capacity to follow the game as linearly as they’d like, or to explore extensively and pursue side quests. Neither approach is over-emphasized nor penalized.

The only real complaint I had about this exploration-heavy aspect of the game is that the minimap leaves something to be desired. Perhaps this will be made more clear in the game’s full release. Don’t quote me on this just yet, but it proved (at least for me) to be a fairly major issue. You may find yourself thrown into the game without much explanation of what the map’s symbols mean, which might lead some players to miss out on side quests altogether and simply follow the much more self-evident marker for the main quest.

Other aspects of the game’s mechanics, though, are well-explained. There is a fun but easy to comprehend combat tutorial to start you off, as well as opportunities to practice sneaking, platforming, and using Ary’s newfound powers before anything gets too intense. Ary and the Secret of Seasons, from what I’ve seen so far, offers a satisfying difficulty curve. It starts out simple and accessible without spending too much time at all coddling you. I really look forward to seeing the wider range of environments, puzzles, traps, and monsters the full game has to offer.

The demo provided comes in two parts. One set close to the beginning of the game that (as mentioned) starts introducing the core mechanics, the significant central characters, and at least begins to teach you about the world in which the game takes place. The second part takes place close to the end of the game, and I had a lot of fun experimenting with the fuller range of Ary’s powers to explore and engage in combat. To be sure, not yet knowing much about what happens between the first and second parts of the demo made the latter section a little confusing in terms of narrative. Still, it planted enough seeds that I’m really looking forward to being able to put all these intriguing elements into context with the game’s full release in early September, and I can recommend you do, too.