Ary and the Secret of Seasons (PS4)
It’s always tragic to play a game that doesn’t seem to understand where its strengths lie. Ary and the Secret of Seasons is an action adventure game that tries to do many things, combat, puzzles, quests, world-building… Not only does it mess up most of these in some way when it comes to their design, it also has a great deal of technical problems making it even less appealing to engage with them. However, around the halfway point, the game suddenly discovers what it’s good at, making the rest of the experience feeling like a walk through wasted potential as you wish Ary and the Secret of Seasons had always been focusing on the seasonal powers.
Ary and the Secret of Seasons takes place in a world where various regions are perpetually locked into a singular season. The people don’t seem to mind their homes experiencing an eternal spring or winter, and in fact, the disruption to this norm is what kicks off Ary’s adventure. All across the world of Valdi, enormous red crystals begin to slam down and shift which season the regions are experiencing, people who had built their cities around their seasons finding this new life extremely inconvenient. Four guardians of the seasons are meant to sort out such issues, but Ary’s father Gwenn, the winter guardian, is too busy mourning his son Flynn after his disappearance. Ary, looking to act in her father’s stead, sets out to meet the other guardians and learn how to set things right. There is a great deal of lore to learn about Valdi if you’re interested in looking for it, but what makes the story a bit more interesting is the care that clearly went into making cutscenes. At times, you are meant to just sit back and watch some comedic romp unfold like when the common hyena enemies bumble their efforts to be villains, and the antics of the kooky guardian of summer Dagdann make your repeated check-ins with the guardians a bit more enjoyable. The game could almost be a cute little animated film, Ary herself a bit of a fun protagonist because she is a go-getter but you can still see the fact she is a young girl just setting out in the world influence how she behaves. On the other hand, near the end of the adventure, it feels like the story starts to layer on a bunch of revelations that overcomplicate the plot and even when characters assure you it makes sense, it’s not satisfying to see such a confusing resolution that leaves some questions unanswered.
While the plot is mostly marred by its rough finale that reaches for more than the narrative can handle, it is the moment to moment action where you start to see what makes Ary and the Secret of Seasons a rough experience. When the game begins, a bit too much focus is put on interacting with the peoples of the world, perhaps in an effort to establish the setting. The problem with this is the gameplay component, the player often given some fairly basic quests to run off to another part of town to grab something and then bring it back. Many of these don’t even try to put you in some peril or make the exploration difficult, but if you do end up in combat, it’s not like it’s exactly a step up in excitement. Ary and the Secret of Seasons’s sword-based combat is very simple no matter how deep into the game you get, and this can be primarily blamed on the lack of variety in the enemies you face. Hyena warriors are found all throughout the game, and while they sometimes get a little extra assistance like some armor or a shield, they’re often fairly easy to just attack over and over and make use of your basic counter to get you a little space if they surround you. Mushrooms are a common foe but so easily dispatched they barely pose a threat, some sentient ice crystals similarly die too quickly for their attack methods to matter much, and while there are big enemies that take a bit more of a beating, the only reason they might give you trouble is they kick you down repeatedly. The kick leaves you unable to act, although thankfully you can’t take damage while down, but the big guys will sometimes kick you repeatedly, so you just have to wait for them to stop doing so to properly fight again.
The only time the game’s combat works well is in specific boss fights that are more like puzzles anyway, and that actually ties to the actual strength of this game. When you begin your adventure, you get the power to shift the seasons around you in a small radius. At first you are limited in which seasons are available, your winter powers used to simple effect at first, but a learning period is a fine enough approach and it introduces ideas like stones that expand out your seasonal powers further when activated or rolling spheres that let you move a season’s area of influence around. The early puzzle opportunities aren’t the deepest and the game dangles many puzzles in front of you out in the world you’re actually meant to solve with later abilities, but where Ary and the Secret of Seasons actually starts to pick up is when you are given all four seasons to work with. This is a bit before the halfway point in the journey, and each season’s influence can cause interesting effects. Spring, for instance, will often make areas with water dry or cause climbable plants to grow. Winter causes the nearby area to freeze, turning water into platforms or making snowpiles you can walk onto. Autumn and Summer, strangely, feel like afterthoughts. Autumn comes with rain and Summer heat, but neither is used to great effect in puzzles and often using a sphere of influence featuring either one is to just duplicate an effect common to all seasons but one, such as adding water back to an area that is naturally experiencing Spring.
When you have all four seasons though, Ary and the Secret of Seasons starts stepping up its puzzle game, the temples in particular constantly coming up with tests of your ability to manage your powers. Carefully escorting season-bearing spheres to create bridges, disabling thorns to make a path forward, making pockets of water so you can swim up to great heights or utilize tools in flooded areas, you begin to find a wide range of interesting puzzles that aren’t always difficult but do make you work and think a bit. You can only have one orb of influence active per season at a time and you can’t make one for whatever season the area is currently experiencing, meaning even the underwhelming Summer and Autumn powers still give you some extra control over your situation. Sometimes the game can get a bit fiddly when it tries to integrate physics into a situation, like making a pendulum with Winter active on it swing to reveal platforms, but Ary and the Secret of Seasons also has a few extra abilities to earn after you get all four seasons to keep things interesting. A slingshot gives you the ability to apply seasons from far away, and a special shot even lets you make icy platforms wherever you like so long as you hit a frozen piece of the environment with your shots. The flexibility of the seasons and slingshot can even allow you to make your own solutions at time that skip an intended path, and had Ary and the Secret of Seasons been focused on creating fertile ground for these abilities, it could have thrived.
Unfortunately, perhaps because of the ambition of the season powers, a lot of Ary and the Secret of Seasons ended up being a bit of a technical mess. Sometime when jumping from one platform to another innocuously, the entire world may briefly disappear. When you defeat the big enemies, the money they drop that is meant for buying alternate outfits will be stuck inside their corpse, and any effort to grab it will just lead to you standing a few feet in the air. There are times you can clip through walls and be stuck if the autosave is overzealous, meaning keeping multiple saves feels like a must to avoid any unwinnable situations since fast travel, a way that could have escaped it, is kept from you for a time. Sometimes the minimap will lie to you about nearby objects or quests because it didn’t detect your interactions properly when engaging with them as well, making side content less appealing even once you’ve got all the abilities and can actually tackle it all properly. There are also sections that are just downright badly designed, like needing to walk around a big city and talk to characters not to learn anything interesting or get a reward but more as busywork. A chase scene where you outrun a ram also feels like it is prone to errors, the traps in your path not always triggering the same or the ram might catch you despite not really being close. Even simple actions like climbing up a ledge sometimes have little glitches like Ary seeming to miss her grab only to teleport above the ledge as she pulls herself up, but since you adjusted thinking you missed the ledge, you might have walked right off anyway. There are even times during vital moments like boss battles where important tools just might not appear for whatever reason, meaning you either finagle your own solution or keep resetting in the hopes it might work properly eventually. So many minor annoyances and issues add up, meaning Ary and the Secret of Seasons unfortunately can’t be a game that finds its footing in the back half since it will always be haunted by the persistent problems carried over from the beginning moments.
THE VERDICT: Whenever you have a good period of focusing on interesting seasonal puzzles in Ary and the Secret of Seasons, you’ll eventually run into something that drags you away from what could have been a fun action adventure. Technical problems make so many small interactions a bit sloppy, the early game is bogged down by meaningless quests with almost no substance, and any combat that involves actual sword-fighting feels mindless because the enemies are constantly rehashed. The temples and your later acquired slingshot powers could have helped the game continue to challenge you even after you had all four season powers unlocked, but the early game putters around with uninteresting tasks instead of letting you get the tools you need to engage with the activities that could have made this game actually worth checking out.
And so, I give Ary and the Secret of Seasons for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. Before it starts pursuing unusual directions near the finale, Ary and the Secret of Seasons provides a cute and sometimes funny story that could have been a decent backbone to a quest to go to the four temples of seasons to save the day. The puzzles within are often well designed and when inside one, you might even forget about the rough edges elsewhere, at least until it makes a token effort at providing danger by lazily chucking some hyenas or mushrooms at you. In fact, with most of its best boss battles more about their puzzle elements and the ones that are more combat heavy almost made worse by that fact, Ary and the Secret of Seasons feels like it should have ignored standard combat and instead leaned entirely into exploring its season mechanics. Even if Summer and Autumn are underwhelming, they still form a good set of options when exploring areas and it does feel pretty satisfying to sometimes use your tools to invent a way around a puzzle or barrier, but at other times doing so might mess you up as you run into glitches or unintended interactions. Ary and the Secret of Seasons clearly wants to be an adventure bigger than a few trips to temples and sadly it had little idea on how to do that, leading to the boring treks through cities and walks through areas that offer little beyond pointless fights until you can come back later with all your skills to solve the actually interesting optional puzzles in the region.
It’s not rare for a game to get better as it goes, early areas meant to introduce ideas while later ones can utilize them in more challenging scenarios. That is sadly not why Ary and the Secret of Seasons gets better the deeper in you go, because the early sections, while teaching some key interactions, are marred by focusing on the wrong ideas. Ary and the Secret of Seasons could have still had its cute and silly cutscenes to make it more than a game about temple puzzles, but so much else of what was added to the mix keeps you away from what actually works. Add in the unintentional hang-ups caused by programming problems and you rarely get to cleanly enjoy the parts of Ary and the Secret of Seasons that could have made it a good game. If it was all as messy as the combat or the early quests, at least the game could easily have been dismissed and forgotten, but instead, Ary and the Secret of Seasons has quite a few areas where it suddenly plays much better. A patient player maybe can push through and see the promise of the seasonal temples and how they make good use of your power set, but it’s not quite enough to redeem the game as it can never fully shake off the problems caused by trying to do more than it was capable of handling.