Need to know
What is it?: A lean steampunk-ish RPG with tactical combat and visual novel storytelling.
Expect to pay: $20/£16.80
Developer: Seismic Squirrel/Chaos Theory
Publisher: Seismic Squirrel
Reviewed on: Windows 11, Intel Core i9, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060
Multiplayer?: No
Steam Deck: Playable
Link: Official site
I open by firing the beam weapon mounted to the hood of my flying coupe, a Chevy-ass gangstermobile that zooms across the glowing streets of New York. Then I jump over my enemy so I can soften them up with the rear-mounted pistol, pull a bootlegger’s turn, and hit ’em with the beam again.
These parts of Aether & Iron are a turn-based Twisted Metal where it costs more action points to accelerate up the road than it does to weave through traffic as you drop back, and undercarriage mine launchers fill the streets with wreckage that those suckers at the back will have to dodge.
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The other half of Aether & Iron is a hardboiled RPG in an alternate 1930s where aether technology sent New York aerial, turning it into a network of floating boroughs connected by ferries, each ruled by a tyrannical baron. It’s inspired by the real New York, but don’t expect to meet Robert Moses or the Pinkertons — most of the cast are broad archetypes drawn from the era. As a cynical smuggler with a fine line in noirish narration, you get drawn into a plot that begins with a plucky young scientist’s discovery that will shake the city, and soon has you tangled up with the Underground plotting to overthrow the worst of the barons.
The story’s told through fully voiced dialogue broken up by skill checks where you roll 2d6 and add your score in the relevant skill, like Gumshoe for figuring out clues or Grease Monkey for mechanical know-how. It’s a bit Disco Elysium even down to your deaths being recounted as newspaper headlines, only without Disco’s skill-based backchat or isometric walkabouts.
All that professional voice acting and engaging tactical combat mustn’t come cheap, which Aether & Iron makes up for with exploration sequences closer to a visual novel. Each location’s a 2D landscape with points of interest to click on and NPCs to interact with, their portraits sliding in from the side of the screen and switching between a handful of broad emotional reactions to your choices. I don’t miss all that isometric jogging from location to location you get in a typical CRPG, but your mileage may vary.
It feels lean and pacey. Without having to click, click, click your way across the screen, Aether & Iron gets to the good stuff fast. The only waiting is when you’re on the overland map, hopping across islands to the next quest destination, or stopping off at a garage for repairs or a safe house to lower your Heat stat so it’s easier to get through any checkpoints on your path.
Though broadly linear, a story of a predetermined character driving along a predetermined plot, there are a couple of sidequests and room to find alternate routes within the story. For instance, while infiltrating the grounds of a sinisterly fancy party I met some debauchees wearing animal masks while their companions without masks stood in cages. “Humans go in cages!” they chanted at me, so I grabbed a lion mask and did an unconvincing roar so I didn’t have to join in whatever kink this was.
I could no doubt have engaged with them more to find a way inside the building, but instead I passed a skill check to play art critic to a barmy artist throwing paint at cattle on the lawn, took her paint, sneakily dumped it on the guard’s car, and got inside while everyone was distracted.
Inside the party, another gauntlet of wacky rich people waited. I had to pick one of their games to participate in to prove I was interesting enough to be allowed upstairs, during which I recognized a kid I’d met in a previous quest and recommended for a job. Now she was being forced to play judge over two gamblers accused of breaking absurd rules—facing a punishment of being drowned in wine, and not in a fun way—a situation I put her in by blithely trying to rescue her from her street urchin life. There’s reactivity and consequence even within a storyline that’s overall as linear as any of the highways combat takes place on.
The combat starts out so easy you barely need to think about it, but suddenly ramps up at the end of act one. I found myself needing to reload an earlier save where I had access to a shop and a garage so I could change my crew’s vehicles around and tinker with their loadouts. You can’t hotswap the weapons or utility tools on your vehicles on the fly, and can’t even use the repair kits in your inventory mid-combat—though you can at least use a welding arm on the back of your truck in the middle of a shootout.
I only hit a few walls like that during the 20-something hours it took to finish Aether & Iron, but it was always awkward to back up and go around. A game over after a skill check meant repeating an entire conversation to get back to that point and roll the dice on whether I’d have to reload again; a final boss fight with three phases and no opportunity to repair between them meant a long trip back to the garage to prepare for it. When Aether & Iron is in gear it fairly barrels along, so it’s even more jarring when it stalls.
Mostly, though, it’s a great example of the kind of RPG that feels like a home game complete with broad caricatures and absurd solutions (the cow paint!) and coming to it after Esoteric Ebb, a densely political RPG that boils down to “voting matters and democracy’s good,” it’s nice to play a game that asks, have you considered Violent Revolution? – preferably with some kind of beam weapon.
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