AETHUS

Wonderful game, the story is well written, the automation/grind is fairly well balanced, crafting concepts and base building is neatly done and not overwhelming. Solid game!

This game is a true gem! I love survival/craft style games when done correctly, and this was one that felt like it had a lot of love poured into it. I also enjoyed the Scottish voice acting as an American player, I think it's cute and attractive, and as such made for a compelling voice over throughout much of the experience. The gameplay I'd rank at about a 95% and I appreciated that there was a difficulty adjustment for every type of challenge to really fine-tune your experience. The story was amazing and really engaged me as a player. I wanted more but I am only saddened by the fact that the game is now over! I wish I could play it again without knowledge of what was revealed at the end. It was both satisfying and bittersweet at the same time. [spoiler]Hopefully a future arc will find Maeve successful with her mission to f*ck the corpos!!![/spoiler]

Passes the time nicely

You should buy this game. Easily one of the best indie games to come out in years. Aethus is what you'd get if you crossed Subnautica with a powerfully emotinal Phillip K ♥♥♥♥ story and AAA voice acting.

Great game and great story!

Aethus was an absolute blast. I don't write reviews very often, but I felt like I had to say something about this amazing game. I started Aethus just looking for something to kill some time, but I ended up getting way more invested in the characters and story than I expected. The gathering and progression mechanics were satisfying, and I never felt like I was just grinding for the sake of grinding. There’s so much to explore and so much lore to find. Honestly, one of my favourite things is the voice acting and the interactions between the characters. The banter and back-and-forth made me laugh a lot, and there were plenty of moments where I caught myself laughing out loud. At the same time, the story took me through a whole spectrum of emotions by the end. Aethus brings together a great story, fun gameplay, memorable characters, fantastic voice acting, and some genuinely funny moments. I honestly wasn't expecting to get as attached to this game as I did. It was satisfying in a way that left me craving more, and I plan to replay it a couple more times. Definitely worth the full price, but I'm not one to pass on a sale either. I also went and bought all the DLC to show my support. Keep doing what you're doing, Pawsmonaut. 10/10.

Overall enjoyed the game though I feel it's really carried by being fully voiced and a bit different and refreshing. I haven't played anything with two very British sounding characters bantering with each other - Maeve and Roland are endearing and fun. There's no combat in this game and you won't meet any other NPCs on the map which makes it feel quite empty and you'll only be doing mining of various resources (no logging, no scything plants, all mining). I recommend that you swap the input style for mining in settings unless you want carpal tunnel. In terms of mechanics, I found the game to be very grindy, especially early game, and found that a bit off putting. The pacing is much better once you hit mid game but Meteorite especially is a huge bottleneck and should be a bit more abundant. Resource drop rates can be adjusted via settings (scroll down) and I really recommend that you do for the sake of your sanity and enjoyment, along with inventory weight limits. I don't think this affects achievements and only one is missable (Vegetarian). I also feel the crafting and menus could have been implemented better and could use some quality of life adjustments (eg. separating machine outputs from inputs and being able to craft the end product without queuing earlier crafts or being able to click through to the earlier recipes) that are common in other games in this genre. Base building - a lot of freedom to build and decorate if you feel like it, though I didn't lean into this. Story wise, nothing groundbreaking, quite a few surprising twists and turns. Really didn't appreciate how much backtracking is involved. One particularly egregious one is locking out a door with a recipe unlock and putting that terminal in the last outpost of the second map. I had to cross the map to get to the last outpost only to have to slowly run straight back after unlocking this door. I don't think it would have killed anyone to just have that be in the same building, it's not exactly a huge upgrade. Performance is fine, unlike some of the other new survival crafters that are so poorly optimised as to be unplayable (looking at you Aloft) by even people with top of the line machines. Very chill game and very story driven compared to most survival crafters.