There have been three Aery games, Path of Corruption being the latest. You are a parrot-looking bird that flies around ugly, texture-lite levels picking up floating feathers while some licensed Envato or epidemic sound music plays. You cannot pause, you cannot do anything but fly, and you will not have fun. Flying like a bird through a deserted mall as AI dialogue prompts you about some weirdo’s choice of vocation may sound enticing to some, so let’s get into it.
The Many Lives of Jack
Every level in Aery starts with some AI-generated-looking dialogue, accompanied by an AI-generated sounding narrator. It’s about a guy who either lived or worked in an area. That area becomes the theme of your current level, and it never makes any sense. You start out in a Mall, then move on to a haunted house, gangster movie, army base, and more.
Graphically the game is hideous, with odd PC-style options at the main menu. I set things to 4k resolution, sixty frames per second, and Ultra graphical settings. The L.O.D. (level of detail) was atrociously low, with massive pop-in at all times in the distance, and zero shadows unless objects were within a few feet of your bird. Most environmental objects have either zero or low-quality textures on them. The lighting is off in multiple levels as well, making it hard to see the floating feathers which are your only objective.
Aery attempts to be a chill, laid-back flying game for kids but the flying feels mediocre. The only controls are the sticks (both control the bird’s flight in the same way), A to increase your speed, or B to slow down. The bumpers can be used to roll in a direction, though this seems unnecessary and breaks the handling. There is no in-game pause, not even a menu. X, B, both triggers, and the d-pad do nothing in the game at all.
Collect-A-Thon
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The game has a few style of levels. The most common is a “follow the feather” lazy flight throughout a scene. Each feather only shows up after the previous one has been collected, and it’s relatively simple. The other main one is a hunt for feathers which ends up being maddening most of the time. Feathers can be anywhere, inside homes, or on top of them, and the layout makes zero logical sense at times.
There is a small selection of songs that will play the entire time, and a few I’ve heard before from streamers and content creators that use Epidemic sound. For how short the game is, you can easily beat it in about 45 minutes, there needs to be more tracks. They repeated multiple times during my playthrough, and rarely matched the setting.
The only sound effects are either when you collect a feather, or when you hit a wall. Hitting a wall means getting instantly teleported back to your last checkpoint. Checkpoints happen whenever you collect a feather. Trying to find the last feather and hitting a wall means you’re teleported back sometimes across the level and it’s MADDENING. The last insult is that the final four levels’ achievements never popped for me after completing them, making the game not even worth it for hunters.
Wrapping Things Up
Aery Path of Corruption is only $10, and even at that price, it’s too much. It is an ugly, boring, poorly paced, and thought-out fever dream of a game that even the most freakish feather head would do their best to avoid.
