Ayala: Forgotten Realms

Genre: Action

Players: 1

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Review:

Ayala: Forgotten Realms (no relation to the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms setting) is a game released in 2025 on Nintendo Switch that is a… Action game, I guess? It’s hard to pin down a genre here. Your character can jump, but there’s not much platforming, and you walk around in large areas without much to do other than occasionally get into fights. So I guess Action it is, then.

In this game, players take the role of Yang, a small anthropomorphic horned creature of some sort, who is transported out of his bedroom to a place with two magical doorways, one leading to some strange wild area with grassy islands and hostile mushroom creatures, and another leading to a desert. This game doesn’t have any dialogue or narration and doesn’t explain what’s going on in any way, so your guess is as good as mine what’s going on here and why.

The presentation in Ayala is decent, with the game presenting large areas and there’s definitely an artistic vision here. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of pop-in, noticeable framerate drops, and there are definitely moments where you can see the seams that reveal this game could have used more polish. These visuals are backed by a piano soundtrack that’s often drowned out by wind sound effects. Sound mixing issues… again, this game could have used more polish.

The biggest problems here are in the gameplay, though. Outside of combat, Ayala is largely aimless, with players often feeling like they need to guess where they must go. That the game uses invisible walls to keep players from wandering off doesn’t really help either, and it’s particularly silly that you can’t walk in some places that have nothing to stop you, but then you can walk right through small huts you encounter early on as if they aren’t there.

Worse still is how this game plays in combat. There’s no nuance here, and your attacks are clunky and unsatisfying. What’s more, enemies like to dogpile you, and you may find that getting hit once leaves you in a state where you can’t recover as a group of enemies surrounds you and beats you to death.

In other words, Ayala is a game that seems pretty at a glance, but it’s a thin facade that’s barely held together over an absolute shambles of a game that is absolutely not worth playing. Skip this one.

tl;dr – Ayala: Forgotten Realms (no relation to the Dungeons and Dragons setting) is an Action game that seems pretty at a glance, but hiding numerous flaws within, including aimless wandering and combat that is so poorly-constructed that you’ll pretty much immediately want to play something else. Don’t buy this game.

Grade: D

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