Aspire: Ina’s Tale Review: A Living Canvas

Aspire: Ina’s Tale is a beautiful puzzle platformer where the desire to discover something new completely encapsulates the protagonist’s motives. Through an eye-catching world, thematic score, and intriguing story, I was quickly enthralled to see the end. Unfortunately, the gameplay itself constantly pushed me back and out of the experience with it’s frustrating inconsistencies and unfair time-based puzzles.

Story

In Aspire: Ina’s Tale, you traverse a 2D world as Ina, a character that you find sleeping, who suddenly awakens with no knowledge of how she got there nor why she was sleeping. Charging herself to answer her questions, she decides to explore this contained world and find a way out. Though the story does get a bit heavy handed with it’s allusions, I found it to be wonderfully thought provoking. Dialogues between interesting characters occur and offer a bit of context for who Ina is, where we are as players, and what everything means in a larger context. There are no accessibility options to enlarge the font, so I was struggling a bit to read the conversations between Ina and the other characters. There’s also a bit of environmental storytelling in the background images that helps piece the story together - a nice touch in my eyes.

Presentation

The first thing I noticed immediately about Aspire is the vibrant colors and stunning backgrounds. The dynamic colors absolutely popped on my OLED Switch and it was a delight to take a screenshot whenever I could. The entire world built within Aspire: Ina’s Tale has a consistent style and aloofness to it, making incredible moving art throughout the game. The quality of the visuals never wavered and Wondernaut Studio should be proud of the pallets of colors woven throughout each area.

Coupled with the gorgeous sprawling designs, the score was also an audio feast to enjoy. Though some of the quieter moments during puzzles felt a bit too quiet, the dynamic (and often tense) end-game moments were really amplified by the fervor and pace of the score. Balancing visuals with sound are often a bit tricky with games, but luckily Aspire and the development team nailed it wonderfully. 

Gameplay

Unfortunately, even with an incredible presentation of visuals and audio, Aspire: Ina’s Tale’s gameplay staggers the most. As a linear puzzle platformer game, I was hoping for more precision with jumps and button inputs. Frustratingly, most cinematic sequences require such exactness with no room for error, that it ultimately loses the moment and enjoyment of the game. This is doubly frustrating because so many of Ina’s actions are at a crawl’s pace or take a few times to find the exact location to activate a prompt (despite being on top of the location itself).

Similarly, the puzzles put the fun to a grinding halt. For the majority of the game, Ina gains the ability to move, enlarge, whatever items, gradually increasing in difficulty per area. However, though the puzzles themselves aren't too challenging to solve, the exactness of timing, paired with some delay in input for jumping or using a switch, is a big disappointment. So with this, even if I knew exactly how to solve a puzzle, I had to attempt it several times because of delay of prompts or just not fully mastering the inconsistent timing of Ina’s actions. Additionally, several puzzles had me stuck, but instead of being able to reset the room within the game, I was left no alternative but to reload at the last save point for a few puzzles - another misstep that pulled me out of the game.

Breakdown

Game: Aspire: Ina’s Tale

Developer: Wondernaut Studio

Availability: Switch, Xbox One, PC

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch (OLED)

Pros:

+ Stunning 2D environments

+ Melodic and thematic score to couple the story beats

+ Unique and interesting characters

Cons:

- Frustrating sequences that require a perfect run, despite aloof controls

- Forced resets to restart puzzles

Final Thoughts

Aspire: Ina’s Tale is a visual showcase of how beautiful games can be, especially on the OLED Switch. However, the occasionally frustrating puzzles resulting in consistent resets or annoying sequences deter from the zen-like experience. Overall, Aspire is a good experience, and if you can get past the puzzle woes, it can turn into a pleasant four hour experience.

Reviewed by Harry Loizides