PAX West 2018: ‘Aground’ Early Access Won’t Leave You High And Dry

I’ve been really drawn to pixel-art style games lately; pretty much anything with sprite avatars catches my interest. The problem is a lot of the games with that art style aren’t super interesting. ‘Aground’ managed to catch my eye and keep my interest. It’s a side scroller survival game, but it has a lot of different mechanics that make the game stand out from other similar games.

I got to play the demo for 10-15 minutes. You play a person who has been shipwrecked on an island and has to collect resources, build shelter, gather and store food etc. to survive. First thing off the bat – you get to customize your character from gender, hair skin and eye colors, and clothes. I guess, you can customize it to an extent since they are pixel-sprites BUT it’s a hell of a lot more satisfying than character selection in ‘Sea of Thieves’.

You are then shown a quick reprise of your shipwrecking before you do a short tutorial of how to collect wood and food and progress through the story line. You meet different NPCs who help you along with quests (Let’s build a storage room!) but the cool thing about the NPCs on this island is that they don’t just sit there and deliver the same one-liners outside their designated area, they actually help you gather resources while you’re off doing different things around the island.

I didn’t progress very far through the story during my short time with the demo, but I definitely got hooked. I am a major fan of survival games like this, and was charmed with the art style. The game also has cool features like MOVING LEFT (I had to get a hint on that one), mining, and eventually, dragons!

I think the best part of this game is its conception. After the release and huge disappointment of ‘No Man’s Sky’, David Maletz, the designer said “I can build a better game than that!” which eventually lead to the creation of Aground, which, while admittedly is very different from NMS, is a much much better game.

‘Aground’ is currently in Early Access on Steam and available for $10.