Aborigenus (Switch)

Good ideas need a conducive place to grow. You can concoct a neat way to play a platformer, but if there isn’t the space for it to flourish, it won’t really matter how much potential the idea had. Aborigenus has mechanics that could have been put to good use in a side-scrolling platformer, but being less than an hour long, it has to try and make the most of what little time it has to explore its ideas. At the same time, trying to crunch everything into such a short run time also lead to issues in how much pressure can be applied to the systems, because if an interaction doesn’t work as intended, it can end up wholly undermining a crucial part of an already lean experience.

 

Appropriately enough for a game whose developers are called Flying Islands Team, Aborigenus takes place on a set of floating islands. Once peaceful, the wildlife have turned hostile and darkness has entered the heart of some of its people. When our unnamed masked hero awakens one day, he finds that the rest of his tribe, including his bride, have been captured by an enemy tribe. Setting out with spear in hand to try and rescue them, he’ll soon find he needs the help of shaman powers to defeat his foes, or at least, for story reasons it is said he needs them. While the shaman magic will expand your attack options, it ultimately plays very little part in the adventure, especially since your hero also starts with a throwing weapon that can be made potent enough to do about as much damage as magic to the flying foes that are otherwise impervious to your spear. The spells are not useless, but if not for a single wall you couldn’t pass through otherwise the magic would be entirely optional to this quest to stop the other tribe’s own shaman from using your captive tribesmen for his dark arts.

In Aborigenus, your standard spear attack is your best bet for dealing reliable damage, but it comes with an interesting option that at first has potential. Regardless of where you find yourself, you can crouch, the enemy unable to see you so long as you weren’t in their line of sight when you hunkered down. Sneaking up to your foe or lying in wait, you can then unleash a spear attack to catch them by surprise, the ambush attack dealing increased damage. At first when you’re walking around a jungle, ambushing giant chickens and spike firing hedgehogs, this can help and might even eliminate the weaker foes in one hit. However, when it doesn’t kill, an enemy will start attacking and often your best bet is then to stab repeatedly with your spear to finish the job. The protagonist has a good deal of health and early enemies like those large chickens drop refills reliably, meaning it isn’t hard to eventually realize you don’t really need the ambush strategy when you can just take the hits and fight your way forward more quickly. Some enemies do eventually change things up by dealing enough damage they can’t be dismissed so easily, but the large rhino beetles are too risky to approach with the ambush and while enemy tribesmen can hit you hard and even knock you off a platform to your doom, it’s often smarter to let them hit you once and then mash your spear attack since they will have their own follow-ups interrupted and thus be easy pickings.

 

The spear ambush ends up a neat novelty without much practical purpose, but it’s not the only tool for combat you’re granted. Right from the get go you have stone daggers you can throw, these not only the only way to hurt flying foes initially, but it also means you can attack some foes from afar. This is useful for when a platform is being guarded by a baddie, but also since there’s no downside to using them, the daggers can clear out some foes without you having to take a risk at all. They are weaker than the spear and foes like the rhino beetle would be a drag to take on with just daggers, but this projectile attack ends up an appreciated option but one that undermines the ambush strike even more. What can make things even more skewed though is the game’s level up system. Every enemy you defeat earns you some experience and you have a few different options for how to upgrade your tribesman. Spear strength is a nice straightforward upgrade that comes with a health increase to make the attack mashing easier, but you can also get more effective throwing weapons that can hit multiple times and deal more damage. If you are foolish you can upgrade your ambush attack too, but considering its situational nature and limited use cases, it just emphasizes even more that Aborigenus can’t really set up interesting scenarios for one of its few distinct mechanics.

The shaman powers can be upgraded as well once you acquire them, but they are similarly a mixed bag. The Turtle Spirit power for example makes a small barrier in front of you to reduce damage, but it drains magic power too quickly and doesn’t help with the mostly prevalent battle approach enemies use of rushing towards you. Even projectile attacks are often best avoided with a quick jump and unless you fully upgrade the spell it doesn’t even mitigate all of the incoming damage anyway. Crow Spirit is at least a simple projectile attack that can be upgraded to be more effective than your throwing tools, and Dark Spirit is a boost to your strength while it’s active that makes your spear mashing more effective. Magic power can be burned through quickly though and its automatic recovery is fairly slow, so the shaman powers have a small footprint on the adventure even if you want to use them.

 

For the most part, this does make Aborigenus a fairly simple action platformer. Sometimes there will be tricky jumps thanks to enemy placement, the rhino beetles at least feel like a proper fight since you need to bait their charges, and the final and only boss asks for some decent movement to survive. There’s a short section where you ride a giant chicken and need to jump and duck properly to avoid crashing, and since every enemy kill earns you some experience, there’s an incentive to search both high and low routes to get some credit towards leveling up, even though there aren’t enough foes to fully power up your hero by journey’s end. For the most part though, your tools for battle are underwhelming or best ignored because the trials before you don’t give you much reason to use them. It’s essentially a simple platformer where you might get a taste of new way to play before defaulting back to regular spear fighting, and the runtime is certainly a factor in that. There’s no room for anything to grow and hardly enough foes to test your powers, and even when you encounter a late game tough enemy like a golem, fighting it is more about baiting out its attack and then striking normally rather than concocting a unique use for any of your extra skills.

THE VERDICT: Aborigenus is unfortunately a poor host for its range of ideas. The ambush strike, the shaman powers, they all fail to do much in a game where the foes you face rarely if ever incentivize their use, boiling Aborigenus down to a game more about hopping around and rapidly pressing the spear attack button to get things done. Some little moments of slightly tricky platforming mean it isn’t absolutely dull and some enemies like the golem at least add a little bit of movement to the spear fighting, but the regular play is shallow and the attempts at adding depth come up short. The pixel art and music can be a bit nice, but Aborigenus is clearly an amateur project that doesn’t know how to realize its ideas in the very little time it takes to beat the game.

 

And so, I give Aborigenus for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. Aborigenus feels a bit like the first project of someone looking to get into game development, Flying Islands Team ultimately one person working alongside someone who helped with the music and sound. However, it’s not the first game they released, so while perhaps it was their first idea considering how well it lines up with their indie company’s name, it at least bears the hallmarks of someone trying to explore the game development space. Ideas are toyed with but not fleshed out to their full potential, and because the more involved mechanics have little room to grow, the more simplistic platforming and enemy encounters define Aborigenus instead. Perhaps Aborigenus was made to hone its creator’s talents and it was deemed better to release it rather than scrap it, but it doesn’t really have much to earn it much attention. It looks fine, its gameplay works, but its systems don’t leave much of a mark on how you experience it once you realize they aren’t often worth using. It was perhaps wiser to wrap up Aborigenus early and send it out rather than continuing to build on it when it seems like there were few ideas on how to make its mechanics work, but had it kept going beyond just the hour it takes to finish it, perhaps more enemies or bosses could encourage you to use your various skills to interesting effect. Perhaps shaman skills could have kept growing, like Turtle Spirit being able to deflect attacks or Dark Spirit giving you a power boost that was almost required to break the defense of tougher foes. Sometimes it is fine to move on from a proejct though, although putting it up for sale and porting it to multiple consoles does feel like an extra effort beyond what you might expect of someone just wanting to share a project that wasn’t going anywhere. It’s simple enough it isn’t awful to play, but Aborigenus didn’t try to be enough with what it does have so it’s hard to say anyone should really check it out.

 

Funnily enough, I’ve ended up reviewing the only version of Aborigenus that is no longer available for purchase. While still possible to find on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation, the Switch version has been delisted for unclear reasons. Flying Islands Team doesn’t mention Aborigenus on their official website yet does mention their first released game Pixel Gladiator still. It only raises further questions about what the intentions were behind releasing Aborigenus, because while it is also possible it was sold because it was deemed fit for publishing despite being so shallow, these two complications speak of a game that the creators might not care much for after the fact. Whatever the reasoning behind its existence, I still hope Flying Islands Team has taken lessons from Aborigenus’s creation and release that carry over to whatever new ideas they aim to realize in the video game medium.