Creatures of Ava is a mix between ECO and Pokemon, with bits and pieces of The Legend Of Zelda series thrown in…you know, for flavor.

You play as Victoria, or “Vic”, who crashes on the planet of Ava. This approach was intended, but without the crashing part, because Vic and her friend Tabitha are attempting to evacuate the planet due to an encroaching floral pestilence that Cannot Be Stopped called The Withering. Shortly after crashing, Vic meets one of the local tribespeople, Nim’ar, who is looking for the Nafitar staff, which Vic finds and learns can turn back this blight. From this point on, Vic needs to rescue creatures, appease the Na’an (who have encountered humans before but are skeptical of Vic’s claims of Impending Doom), and do what she can to turn back the infection on Ava.

Creatures of Ava is an open-world-ish adventure game focused on ecological concerns and animal collection, but it puts its own spin on both. The Withering manifests two conditions. The first is glowing rosettes that can be found blocking progress. Vic can use the staff to drain the energy from them, thereby removing the wall of vines that are attached.

The second manifestation is though blighted creatures. These are aggressive versions of normally docile animals, and Vic can use the staff to drain the sickness from them the way she does to open passageways, except in this case the targets are trying to attack and break the connection. Vic needs to maintain the connections until the creature has been cleansed. There’s a few tricks involved, such as taking advantage of chaining multiple creatures in one beam and diving out of the way of an attack, but most of the difficulty in this process seems to be environmental, as some areas where infected creatures are encountered are close-quarters, which can make maneuvering out of an attack path a bit difficult, and also countering the unique attacks from the creatures being tethered.

Ava is a peaceful planet, and the Na’an live in a kind of psychic symbiosis with it. As such, they have ways to commune with the planet and with the creatures that inhabit it. Early on, Vic learns how to engage with animals through music: each creature has a song represented by a series of notes which Vic needs to play back in order to pacify them. The song is represented over a creature’s head by a pie-slice. Vic’s notation is represented by a wheel of notes. The player needs to select the notes on the wheel corresponding to the pie sequence played by the critter, and when successful, the creature will follow Vic around so long as she has the flute equipped.

This mechanic has two purposes. The first is the Song of Ava, which allows Vic to transfer her consciousness to the creature in order to use the creature’s special abilities to interact with environmental puzzles. Each creature has a specialty, like charging down certain obstacles, cutting ropes or lines, or digging up usable items from piles of rubble (these are the only creature abilities I have encountered so far).

The second use is to lead creatures into the radius of collection bots. As Vic and Tabitha’s mission is to evacuate as many creatures as possible from Ava, this is the way that critters are “teleported” up to the station above the planet. There are several general areas within a zone, and each area has a number of different creatures that need to be collected before the bot trundles off. The zone itself has a total number of creatures that need to be collected in order to progress the story, so aside from story quest it’s a self-paced way that the game pushes the player through the open world zones, looking into canyons and delving through caves, to find where Tabitha dropped the collection bots.

I had originally played Creatures of Ava during one of the Steam NextFests and really enjoyed it; it was one of those demos I had to stop playing so I wouldn’t spoil it for myself when it released. I feel like there’s a good amount of originality here. The plot is fairly good, at least so far, in the way that the player is trying to play the “human savior” for the “good” of the inhabitants of Ava, but I’m sure there’s going to be a moment of illumination at some point where we finally understand how full of itself humanity can be, the meaning of ecological symbiosis, or something like that. Using “musical Simon” to tame creatures is a different mechanic, and I really like the way that it is implemented so that non-musical players — such as this guy — don’t have to know music to be able to play. That the same mechanism is used in several different ways — to tame, to lead, and to control — makes the music idea more than a one-trick pony. The combat and the cleansing mechanics are nice, but they are mostly there to add tension (combat) or to add a layer of puzzles (cleansing) to the game and while that’s not unwelcome, they are my least favorite aspects of the game so far.

Finally, there’s the Na’an, and I need to give them their own section. Sometimes video game writing is sub-par (Tarisland, for crissakes), or filled with tropes, or tries to be “humorous”, but rarely have I run into a game where NPC dialog feels like a actual unified front or a real example of cultural unity like I get with the Na’an. The sentient creatures of Ava have met humans before, 25-some-odd years ago when humans arrived and set up research stations on the planet. They apparently got along well with the Na’an, but then something must have happened to sour that relationship. The researchers are no longer present, but have left facilities and notes scattered around Ava, and when Vic arrives at the first Na’an town, very few of the natives are happy that the humans have returned. I think that in other games the writers might have made the Na’an angry, dismissive, or even strangely “human-sarcastic”, but the Na’an are more disappointed in a way that feel like they own it, and in a way that feels non-human despite the fact that they have apparently mastered human languages.

There’s certainly a level of “stupid human doesn’t understand our ways or themselves” going on, but the dialog from each NPC is always on point. Some are mean, some are actually excited to see humans again, and some are just really tired of off-worlders coming down to Ava and running amok. Some of the dialog is amusing without going for the usual level of jokes we’d expect from a video game; maybe it’s because the design of the Na’an kind of makes them look perpetually tired of everyone’s shit.

Lastly, there’s a few “gamification” mechanics. Exploration includes finding creatures or points of interest and taking pictures of them. Doing so can help Vic level up and earn research points. These points are spent on enhancing the staff’s abilities or Vic’s performance in combat, among other things. There are also shrines to investigate, censers to commune at, and ziplines to unlock. Plus, the staff can gain new abilities at certain points in the story to help Vic overcome new zone obstacles. I appreciate the variations on a single mechanic (the photographing) and the discoverable items and places in the world but I’m not entirely confident that I’m going to be paying enough attention to my surroundings to catch some of them. There’s also crafting; Vic can collect wild-growing resources in the world to be able to make potions and such, but it seems limited to just potions and such, although there are items in the world that can be found and combined to increase Vic’s health maximum and the size of her inventory (at least).

I wouldn’t go so far as to categorize Creatures of Ava as a “cozy” game specifically because of the combat, but aside from that, it is a relatively relaxing game. I have been finding myself spending more time exploring around the Na’an village to collect resources and find creatures rather than bee-lining my way towards the mission objectives. Part of the fun has been talking with the key NPCs just to see how they diss humanity, which I find kind of funny in an exasperated way. As I always do, I’m hoping to maintain interest in Creatures of Ava for long enough to see it through, because I enjoy the setting, the gameplay, the style, and the writing, and would feel bad if I let myself get distracted by some other task or game, yet again.