Worlds of Aria

Genre: RPG

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Worlds of Aria, released in 2024 on PC and ported in 2025 to Nintendo Switch, is a family-friendly RPG that gives players an extremely simplified take on the experience of playing a tabletop RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, stripped down to the point it almost resembles a Party Game. Through the course of this game’s story, players will take the role of one of a group of archetypal characters who find themselves unwittingly thrust into the center of a plot to unseat the rightful monarch of a kingdom.

Now, when I say this game is similar to Dungeons and Dragons, that comes with certain expectations, and you’ll definitely need to tamp those expectations down. You won’t be making a character, you won’t be making broad choices about the direction your campaign goes in, you won’t be acting out any sort of complex decision making, and won’t be making choices about what skills your character receives as they progress and level up.

Basically, if we’re comparing this to D&D, Worlds of Aria plays out as if the Dungeon Master made you choose between an assortment of pre-made characters, insists on handling your character sheets for you, railroads you through a largely linear campaign, and only gives players choices in the form of multiple-choice questions. For some D&D players, this will be antithetical to what this style of game represents, but for other players, and especially more novice players, this could provide an easy entry point into tabletop gaming that could give a taste of what to expect from the genre.

Each character has its own class with different stats and its own unique class-based skill, but for the most part these characters are interchangeable. When a character levels up at the end of each “session”, they can choose from a random selection of skills to upgrade for each point they earned by meeting various goals (some known prior to the session, some hidden until afterward), which gives players some utility to further decide their character’s strengths and weaknesses as they progress. In addition, each character can equip up to two items which further augments their stats. These pieces of equipment are completely interchangeable, without class requirements or anything like that.

Gameplay takes the form of a series of encounters, where players must decide how their characters will act, with a few different options provided. Players indicate their choice by moving a figurine representing their character to a spot on the screen indicating a choice of action, with some choices showing each character’s chance of success based on their stats. After everyone has chosen, the game plays out based on those choices, with players sometimes rolling in-game dice to determine the outcome (for some reason aiming for low rolls, not high ones – a “nat 1” in Worlds of Aria is the best possible roll, and a “nat 20” is the worst).

On some occasions, you may be forced to make your decisions quickly, moving your figurines to their spots before a countdown timer elapses. This becomes particularly frustrating if you’re playing with a group of fewer than a full four players, as players must also make choices for any characters not being played by a human player.

Given the limited choices players are offered, you’ll encounter plenty of occasions where the choices you’re given don’t really fit what you’re trying to do, or where they choice you took had your character doing something you didn’t intend for them. However, the game finds moments to use its format to make things interesting, such as an early section where players must hunt for loot in a dungeon by literally moving their cursor around the room and tapping on suspicious spots. If players are anything less than completely cooperative, moments like this can make for good competition as players scramble to be the first to uncover the good loot.

Speaking of the cursor, this game’s menu system sucks. You must often manually move a cursor around the screen to interact with things, and this game doesn’t have any options to use gyroscopic motion controls for aim, nor does it make use of the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen. And it definitely feels like your fortunes in this game are more tied to lady luck than in normal D&D – both use dice rolls to decide success or failure, but D&D gives players far more tools to mitigate failure or bring about success.

Finally, let’s talk about the presentation here. Worlds of Aria makes use of a presentation that uses a mix of 2D and 3D elements, with locations in 3D and characters represented by 3D figurines, but objects and other characters represented by flat cutouts. This highlights the game’s “tabletop” aesthetic, which works well for the game even if it doesn’t impress on a technical level. I just wish the game’s occasional (and usually brief) loading times didn’t interfere with the flow of the game’s pacing.

This is particularly noticeable due to this game’s use of voiced narration, which is decent, but it’s distracting when she’s narrating events as they happen, but those events may be taking a moment to load up. The player’s characters are also voiced, though none really establish much of a personality beyond their broad archetype – the thief says things related to thievery, the wizard says things you might expect from a magical wizened old man, and so on. This is backed by an instrumental soundtrack that generally does a good job emphasizing the game’s usually-whimsical tone, but doesn’t go so far as to be especially memorable in my opinion.

Overall, I think Worlds of Aria generally succeeds at doing what it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do might not appeal to everyone. It makes for a good, accessible, family-friendly entry point for players curious about tabletop gaming, but perhaps apprehensive about complicated character management, nuanced decision-making, and detailed character improvisation. As I noted before, for many fans of tabletop gaming, those are a large part of the point of the thing, but players looking to just dip their toe in and see what it’s like can consider this a decent indication. In that regard, I’d say Worlds of Aria’s biggest stumbles are frustrating menu navigation and gameplay that is too dependent on random chance. However, despite these issues, this makes for an enjoyable take on a beloved genre.

tl;dr – Worlds of Aria is an RPG that provides players with an extremely-simplified take on the experience of Tabletop gaming, which removes a lot of the elements that players find attractive about tabletop, but nevertheless still provides for a fun, accessible, family-friendly entry point to the genre. It’s not without its flaws – menu navigation isn’t very great, and there’s too much reliance on luck. However, overall this is a fun introduction to a style of game that many players may otherwise find intimidating.

Grade: B-

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