Aethermancer Preview | You Call Them Monsters, I Call Them Friends

Aethermancer from developer moi rai games and publisher offbrand games has just released onto Steam Early Access and I’ve played the first few hours. I’m familiar with creature collecting games, mostly Pokemon of course, so I was looking forward to this unique take on the genre. So far, Aethermancer looks great, and has complex but fun gameplay mechanics. 

In the game, you play as the titular Aethermancer, a being that is able to form bonds with monsters in order to train them and utilize them in battle. Each battle is turn-based and each of your monsters has a certain number of unique abilities, strengths and weaknesses. You’ll choose your starter monster, but will soon be able to recruit more to your team. Each monster has elemental traits such as water, fire, earth, etc. and can use those to benefit the team when fighting enemies.

Enemies, just like your team of monsters, have strengths and weaknesses. As you recruit more monsters, you’ll have to strategize, help them grow stronger and find synergies between your party. It wouldn’t do you any good, for example, to have three monsters that all have the water element as their main strength. Building a team with multiple affinities is likely the best course of action. 

As you can imagine, the more you level up your team the more complex things will get in terms of gameplay. Every monster has a skill pool that will react to the previous choices that you made and create powerful combinations with the rest of your team. Experimentation and strategy are key to building up good synchronizations. I found that it was a good idea to recruit multiple different types of monsters to find out what the best combinations were.

The Early Access version of Aethermancer includes 1 player class, 3 difficulty modes, 28 monsters, 443 abilities, 3 biomes, 4 avenues of metaprogression, town decorations and a Monster Deity boss fight. So there’s tons to do in Early Access, with updates planned for the coming months as the team receives feedback from the community. 

The moi rai games team plans for the game to be in Early Access for approximately one year according to its Steam page. The full version will add polish, quality of life improvements, more monsters, more biomes, a fleshed-out end game area, deity boss fights and player classes. 

Grab Aethermancer on Steam Early Access now or wishlist the game to stay up to date on any future news. There is also a demo available if you’d like to try it out first.