Video Game Review: Ageless

Ageless

Puzzle Platformer

One More Dream Studios

Nintendo Switch

Ageless is the debut title from One More Dream Studios, a puzzle platformer that feels very much like it wants to be the next Celeste. The story follows a young woman named Kiara who seeks to receive a magical “Gift” from some sort of divine being as she believes it will help with her feelings of aimlessness and depression. When it doesn’t do so immediately, she starts trying to use it to help people so she can feel useful to others for the first time in her life. If you’ve played Celeste, you can see how there are thematic similarities, but the story is of course different enough in many ways that it felt promising when I first started. Unfortunately, the further I got in the more and more I felt disappointed; the dialogue feels unnatural, the exposition feels forced, and the general pacing feels completely off.

The story wasn’t the only part that disappointed me. The game’s mechanics center around Kiara’s “Gift”, which encompasses the abilities to change the ages of plants and animals around her and to absorb their life energy to dash in any direction. It’s a cool concept and makes for some interesting puzzles in theory but in practice the gameplay was frustrating. For starters, the method used to control creatures’ age is a magical bow that fires aging and de-aging arrows, but the aiming feels finicky at the best of times and I’d often spend ten seconds or more trying to line up a shot only for the controls to swerve my aim as soon as I released. This wasn’t the only issue I had with precision in Ageless either, as hitboxes can be flawed in such a way that you sometimes have to be very specific in your path to avoid a hazard or nail the timing of a bit of platforming. Combine that with some hazards not always being as clearly visible as they should be and I often felt like the game was testing my patience more than my skill, especially in some of the optional side rooms. To top it all off, sections of the game were longer than I would’ve liked, and I would keep thinking “surely I must nearly be at the end of this bit” only for it to just keep going on and on, well overstaying its welcome.

Ageless has issues in its presentation as well. Though the sound design and pixel art models are largely unremarkable, the animations are weightless and fail to give the action any real sense of life. Similarly, the faces of the characters in dialogue box portraits are all the same bland-looking design that makes it hard to really get attached to anyone. The environments and backgrounds are nice enough to look at, but their novelty wears off fairly quickly.

Ageless has some interesting ideas but every aspect of it has enough minor flaws that they build up to create something I simply don’t like. If even just a few of the issues hadn’t been present I think the game could’ve been mediocre or even good but as things stand it’s a chore to play and I wouldn’t recommend it.