Aethermancer certainly looks like a game I’d love. Part monster tamer, part turn-based RPG, and part roguelite, the vibrant pixel graphics bring the next game from the Monster Sanctuary team at moi rai games to life in an astounding way. If, like me, this is the first you’re hearing of Aethermancer and you can’t get enough, it’s having an alpha test soon that you can have a chance to get involved with.
With some truly beautiful sprite art, Aethermancer is a turn-based monster-tamer RPG game in the vein of Pokemon, with a series of roguelike elements spliced in. With an alpha test happening soon, you can get your hands on an incredibly early build of the game behind closed doors; otherwise, you’ll want to learn more about the game below.
While most tamer RPGs only give you one creature at a time, Aetermancer lets you use three in combat, with each having its own skill selection system. You’ll need to be tactical in which of the three monsters you pick while using four different elements to your advantage too.
The true twist comes in the roguelike element, which almost turns Aethermancer into a sort of Nuzlocke. Basically, when a monster dies it’s gone for good, but you can put their souls into new monsters, carrying over their skills to new creatures you want to use, meaning that even when a monster is gone, part of it lives on.
Unlike the competition, Aethermancer also lets you pick between an array of classes that can impact how you interact with combat encounters, combining with the choice of monsters and their reincarnations to offer up a lot of variety.
It also helps that Aethermancer is absolutely gorgeous, the use of pixel graphics and vibrant lighting really invokes a similar aesthetic to Sea of Stars, another game that proves how timeless pixel visuals can be.
There’s no release date for Aethermancer but you can head on over to the Steam page to wishlist the game, with the most recent update providing a link to the game’s Discord so you can enter the raffle for the opportunity to alpha test the game. The raffle to get in is ongoing until Wednesday April 17, so don’t hang around.
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