Sands of Aura

Sands of Aura is a top-down soulslike action RPG developed by Chashu Entertainment. The game was up for grabs on Prime Gaming (now Amazon Luna) about a year ago. After having beaten it, I feel free (Prime trial) was a fitting price for the game. It has some cool ability and item design but levels and gameplay have problems that make the experience occasionally rather infuriating. I suppose that's not uncommon for a soulslike, though.

Low budget soulslike

The copy on Prime was for Epic and for some reason a whole lot of the game's achievements I should've gotten never unlocked. I had decided beforehand not to 100% the game upon seeing NG+ and sweaty achievements but it still bothered me that things weren't working properly. I don't know if the problem was on Epic's side or the game's. I played on two different machines, with two different Windows versions, nor did Ghostrunner 2 have this problem a short while back. But who knows. Woe to anyone trying to be a completionist with Sands of Aura on Epic, I guess.

Ever since a great calamity struck the game's world of Talamhel, it has been a sea of moving sand that needs to be traversed on sailboats. The few existing settlements are on small rocky islands. Gameplay-wise the sailing is mostly a time-waster. There are few resource pickups around to collect but once you've docked to a place, you can fast travel from thereon.

You play as a soon-to-be-full-fledged member of the Order of the Remnant Knights, ready to save the world. And that's what you will be doing.

Curious choices

Sands of Aura's top-down camera was certainly a design choice to make. Why not have a normal third person perspective? It reminded me of The Lost Gods DLC for Immortals Fenyx Rising, restricting the player's view for no good reason. The camera does rotate horizontally and you can ever so slightly adjust the vertical angle but it sure feels limiting to not be able to see properly ahead when going upwards a hill and such. None of my screenshots seem to present the normal gameview; I should take a couple more later.

Atypically for a soulslike, Sands of Aura has no lock-on feature. According to forum posts, the developers did try it but never managed to make it feel good. Most of the time it doesn't matter: attacks have big hitboxes and I think it there's some slight autoaim. My attacks weren't missing unless the enemy was moving away or frantically jumping about. However, with lock-on, your relative facing to the enemy would be clearer. Attacks from behind -- and that includes those against you -- get a critical bonus modifier. I died multiple times from dodging and my back then being towards the enemy. Running away tends to be quite dangerous due to the mechanic as well.

Rarely a game has a weird controller button layout and Sands of Aura's, too, is mostly quite sensible. However, holding down B being sprint and X being jump is not commonplace. How are the developers holding their controllers to make a running jump comfortably with those buttons? I can technically hold B and hit X with A (interact) simultaneously but it was quite awkward to say the least. Instead I switched to mouse and keyboard for the few times I needed a longer jump to get to a hard-to-reach place.

Character progression is based on gear upgrades. If you're behind on the curve, the game can be very difficult. For instance, I got stuck on the boss of Ruins of Hurwell until I upgraded what I could. Dying and getting back to your dropped glint (souls) on the levels is also a slow and precarious journey if enemies aren't being easy to kill. Locations aren't massively huge but they are quite populated and there are rare few resonance bells (bonfires) and shortcuts back to them. I also question the idea of putting a boss's resonance bell behind an area transition. One boss even has their bell behind two such transitions. There are no enemies in-between but dying on the boss means going through three whole loading screens before you can try again.

Cool mechanics

The mentioned Ruins of Hurwell boss is one where parrying seemed to be the key to the fight. Parrying and block happens by bringing up your lantern. There's a bit of a learning curve because there's a slight delay but if you manage to hit the button at the right time, the attacking enemy will be stunned for a couple of seconds, allowing you to wail critical hits on them. There's a talisman that increases the parry window but in the second half of the game I stopped parrying altogether because I started using Ferrum Steel Armor set whose set bonus grants a big damage increase for a few seconds after dodging an attack.

Dealing damage charges up your corruption gauge and once it has at least one bar filled, you can spend it on a special attack determined by your wielded weapon style. Based on how much corruption you had, you deal more damage and get spellblade charges. The charges can be used to enhance the next block, dodge, or attack. The Spell Book of Time's effect on attack is a wonderful one, teleporting you behind your target with bonus damage for the attack.

There are no weapons to loot in Sands of Aura. Instead they're crafted by you. You don't really need more than one either because you can alter it at a forge any time for a cost, although there are a couple of talismans that enable certain effects to be active from both wielded weapon sets. You get to choose a weapon's head(s), fighting style, pommel, and codex. I ended up using dual axes (haste and crit damage) with Hallowed Ground pommel (damage bonus area) and Timeworn codex (armor reduction).

For most of the game, getting more talisman slots is behind a lot of effort. Each slot upgrade requires 10 Liturgies of Leisis and they're often hidden and/or at high-up places. Then, in the endgame, there turned out to be enemies that have a fairly high chance to drop the liturgies, kind of devaluing all the parkouring I had done.