Aether Keepers

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

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Review:

Aether Keepers, released in 2026 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is fairly original take on the Tower Defense genre. In this game, players don’t build their towers and don’t attack enemies. Instead, players upgrade their abilities in between runs, and then focus on repairing their defenders and collecting dropped loot during runs.

I have to be honest, my first impression of this game was not a good one, and that’s partly the game’s fault, because it does a poor job explaining what you’re supposed to do. I’ll tell you the important part right now: players can press the minus button at any time to abandon a run, keeping any loot they scored before they quit. This is super-important because in your current state when you first start, you’ll be losing pretty quickly. Instead of trying to win, you’re meant to try to go as far as you can before calling it quits, giving this game a good risk/reward mechanic right from the start.

Between runs, you’ll be selecting upgrades on an expanding ability tree, which range from more health for your home base or its defenders, higher attack damage, more defenders, or more interesting things like enemies that detonate after defeat to damage other enemies, or having your cursor additionally empower your units as you pass over them.

As stated, during a run, you won’t be actively engaging in battle. Instead, you’ll control the movement of a banner that generates a healing effect for nearby units, and also collects nearby loot left by defeated enemies. This takes some getting used to, and in fact the controls for this are pretty terrible – you’ll want to turn down the cursor sensitivity all the way to even have a shot at moving the cursor where you want. Thankfully, this is only one facet of the gameplay.

The presentation here is decent but not great, using simple 2D visuals to depict the action. Unfortunately, it becomes very easy to lose sight of what you’re looking for when things get really crowded, something I feel could have been addressed with more distinctive, stand-out visuals. Also, when things get especially busy, the framerates start to chug considerably, something that becomes so problematic as the game progresses that I would argue the game’s final level gets to the point where it becomes unplayable – even after fully upgrading, I cannot beat this game because its last moments are a slide show that make it impossible to interact with. Anyway, these visuals are backed by a New Agey soundtrack that works well for the game’s general abstract visuals, though there is one issue – whenever a song ends and the next one loads up, the game freezes for a moment, which gets irritating.

Despite its flaws, Aether Keepers is surprisingly compelling, and it has a great “just one more run” quality to it that makes you immediately want to try out your new upgrades purchased between runs. And while there are multiple problems here, including a final level that’s pretty much unplayable, the game’s $3 price tag is so low it’s easy to forgive these issues, especially with how unique and creative this game’s approach to the Tower Defense genre is. If you’re looking for a really laid-back take on this genre with a lot of compelling “number go up” progression, I think Aether Keepers is well worth its low price.

tl;dr – Aether Keepers is a Tower Defense game where players don’t build towers or attack enemies, but passively heal their units and collect loot, then use that loot between runs to upgrade. It’s a unique approach to the genre that has quite a few flaws – poor controls, gameplay that freezes whenever the music track changes, lack of a proper tutorial, and framerates that chug so hard towards the end they make the game unplayable. However, those flaws are easily forgiven when the game is $3 and fairly original within its own genre. If you’re looking for a more relaxed take on Tower Defense games, this is definitely worth a look.

Grade: B-

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