Aspire: Ina’s Tale

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

(Note: This game is a part of the Golf Club Wasteland / Aspire: Ina’s Tale Bundle, along with Golf Club Wasteland)

Aspire: Ina’s Tale is a Puzzle-Platformer being released in 2021 on PC, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch (it’s coming out the day after this review is being published). This game follows a young girl who awakens in a machine-filled tower, and sets out to escape the structure.

Aspire makes use of some really striking stylized 2D visuals with some really nice artistic design, giving each section of the tower its own distinct appearance. There’s some really good use of color here and some really nice details that do a good job of depicting a grand structure falling apart after what looks like a massive and fantastical battle. The game’s mostly peaceful locales are backed by a lovely soundtrack that includes instrumental themes as well as some Asian-influenced and anime-influenced music. In short, while this isn’t a game that’s going to wow you with its beauty, it is nevertheless a pleasant audiovisual experience throughout, although I will note that I encountered a bit of slowdown in places, and even a few brief visual “hiccups” – nothing game-breaking, but worth noting, all the same.

The puzzles in this game mostly focus on Ina’s ability to absorb and use “spirits”, color-coded floating geometric shapes that each allow Ina to manipulate objects in the game in different ways, doing things like empowering switches, making blocks grow, or causing platforms to move. Ina cannot use these abilities freely even after she acquires them – she needs to absorb a “spirit” from the environment and then place it elsewhere to make use of it, and early on you’ll learn to make sure to grab these back up after using them so they can be reused again, though each puzzle is separated from others by barriers to ensure you won’t be carrying a spirit from one area to the next.

The puzzles here overall are quite good, and it felt like this game has a lot of potential to explore not only their varied uses, but their potential interactions. Unfortunately, the game is only about 4-5 hours long, and it feels like more time is spent teaching players how to use Ina’s abilities than actually pushing the player to use them in creative ways. By the time you’re really ready to start stretching your use of these abilities, you’ll already be in the final stretch of the game.

However, there are other problems here that are even more troubling. Namely, the platforming here is just terrible, with sluggish, stiff controls, slow walking speed, and weak jumps that make the simple act of moving from place to place feel like a chore. In addition, puzzles in this game sometimes require the use of levers to move objects in the environment, and a few times these levers blended into the background making them difficult to see. I spent far less time in this game being truly stumped by puzzles than I was stopped simply because I couldn’t see a lever I needed to use, and I died far too many times due to simple platforming failures.

In the end, Aspire: Ina’s Tale is still a mostly-good Puzzle-Platformer with good puzzles and a pretty aesthetic, but the experience is marred somewhat by the issues with the Platforming and the game’s pacing issues. Fans of the genre who don’t mind a short experience still may want to give this one a look, though, as it is largely enjoyable while it lasts.

tl;dr – Aspire: Ina’s Tale is a Puzzle-Platformer about a girl trying to escape a machine-filled tower by absorbing “spirits” that allow her to influence the environment in different ways. The puzzles here are very good, but the game ends just when it feels like it’s starting to really get going, and what’s here is brought down somewhat by poor platforming and slow movement. Still, despite these issues, this is an overall pleasant experience that fans of Puzzle-Platformers should find to be well worth trying.

Grade: C+

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