How many times have you saved the world lately? Play enough video games and it could be so frequent it’s hardly worth noticing. Everyone wants to be a hero, and games give you that ability, setting up problems to solve as inevitably as dominoes falling one after the other, whether that’s fending off an alien invasion or sealing away an ancient evil. But there are still stories to be told that complicate our vision of heroism and ask point-blank whether the world even needs heroes at all.
Creatures of Ava begins as yet another world-saving tale, casting you as a researcher sent to rescue alien wildlife from a spreading infection who finds there may be a way to protect the entire planet instead. But it ends up being far from a typical savior story, instead raising tough questions about whether parachuting into a place you don’t understand to save it is possible — or even admirable.
We Come In Peace
Developed by Inverge Studios and Chibig, Creatures of Ava was first pitched as a sort of anti Pokémon, a game about nurturing and taming wild animals rather than capturing them. It stars Vic, a scientist sent to the world of Ava, where an unstoppable rot called the Withering is consuming all the planet’s life. Your job is to collect healthy specimens of as many of the world’s animals as possible and ship them back to your BioArk, a futuristic nature preserve floating in orbit. Once on the planet, Vic meets an archaeologist among the local humanoid population called the Naam and discovers a staff left behind by a now-extinct species with the power to cleanse the Withering.
Befitting her conservationist role, Vic doesn’t engage in combat in Creatures of Ava. Instead, she uses her staff to fire a healing beam at infected creatures (think Overwatch’s Mercy) to cure them of Withering. Being wild animals, the local fauna don’t take kindly to Vic’s well-meaning intervention and fight back until they’re cleansed. Vic gains abilities that let her freeze or levitate the agitated critters to make her job easier, but the core of Creatures of Ava’s action lies in dodging attacks until the healing beam can do its work.
It is, overall, fine. While the action isn’t technically combat, the difference is mainly aesthetic, resulting in the creatures you’re aiming at being restored to their natural state instead of being vaporized as they might in another game. Vic’s additional abilities and the creatures’ unique attacks add a bit of spice to encounters that would otherwise just consist of holding down a trigger, but the healing mechanic feels quite repetitive, changing very little over the course of the game.
Once you’ve healed your quarry, you can tame them by playing a tune on a Naam flute given to you early on. You charm cleansed creatures automatically or tame animals that were never infected by listening to their song and replicating it, selecting each note in turn from an onscreen wheel. The game’s options include a setting to show a visual representation of which note you need to hit that floats above creatures’ heads or you can just go by sound if you’re particularly musically inclined. Like healing creatures, serenading them stays the same mechanically throughout the game, though learning unique melodies to be able to play is a satisfying challenge that fits nicely with the game’s theme of connecting to nature. Once they’re charmed, you lead Ava’s animal to extraction points where they can be beamed back to the BioArk.
A Whole New World
After an hour or so of performing flute solos for animals in Ava’s grasslands, the game’s good-but-not-great mechanics were starting to get old. Traversing the world to reach extraction points and solving simple platforming puzzles also means dealing with Vic’s somewhat clunky movement, which results in quirks like the jump button sometimes failing to register and one instance where I got stuck behind a rock in a shallow pond and had to load an earlier save. Creatures of Ava seemed like a pretty but shallow affair, something with the distinct feel of a game from a generation or two ago, for better or worse. But within another few hours, I was completely hooked.
What elevates Creatures of Ava to another level is Ava itself. After a few hours in a grassland region, you’re sent to the jungle as part of your quest to unite the Naam tribes scattered around the planet. The grassland Naam are eager to reunite with their neighbors, and Vic agrees because it will make abducting them back to her spaceship en masse easier, so off to the jungle she goes.
Ava’s grassland is gorgeous, with an entire crayon box’s worth of color in its wildlife and dramatic vistas cleverly framed by the routes you’re forced to travel by the game’s level design. But arriving in the jungle is a shocking transition. Where the grassland is a world of vast plains, the jungle is thick with vegetation, with sharp cliffs and massive tree roots forming a natural maze of paths for Vic to navigate. It’s at least as colorful as the grassland, but with deep purples dominating the color palette, making it feel like a believably different biome.
Two later regions, a swamp and a desert, are just as distinct, not only featuring their own gorgeous visual design, but also changing the way Vic navigates their unique landscapes. Just as impressive as what each biome shows you is what it seems to be hiding. Ava feels massive, but the actual maps of each of its regions aren’t that large. The game instead relies on obstructing your sightline and forcing you to take winding paths through its levels to complete the illusion that there’s much more to Ava’s landmass than what you’re actually exploring.
Beyond the Hero’s Journey
Just as crucial as Ava’s excellent design are the Naam who populate it. Vic isn’t the first human from her crew to visit Ava, and she’s shocked to find that after a human expedition to the planet a few years prior, the Naam have learned fluent English (or whatever language you happen to be playing in) thanks to an innate aptitude for learning languages. Creatures of Ava shines in Vic’s interactions with the Naam, which are heartfelt and funny, often leaning into the cultural differences between the two species. From the beginning, my guard was up for Creatures of Ava to devolve into some form of white savior/noble savage trope. While it veers into that hackneyed territory with some of the Naam’s visual motifs, it’s more interested in subverting and complicating those stories rather than repeating them.
The Naam are a complicated, diverse species, living in almost supernatural connection to Ava’s animals, but still beset by relatable problems. Some of Creatures of Ava’s funniest and most surprisingly touching moments come in side quests. I wasn’t expecting to teach an alien about the human concept of love or help a near-stranger come to terms with their inability to have a child, but those became some of the highlights of my time with the game.
Beyond those small moments of humor and connection, Creatures of Ava’s story focuses on Vic learning to appreciate Ava as the Naam do instead of making it conform to her own ideas and expectations for it. The unexpected directions the story goes are what make Creatures of Ava a fascinating adventure despite its flaws, but to spell them out here would be to spoil the game’s biggest appeal. Vic lands on Ava hoping to help by saving the planet one creature at a time. Her journey lies in learning that the real help she can offer isn’t in saving the world the way she wants, but in showing it kindness, helping its people with their more mundane woes, and bringing them together when it’s most important.
Creatures of Ava is a mixed bag when it comes to mechanics, but it’s a game I couldn’t stop playing once I saw the beauty under its surface. The world of Ava is one of the most compelling environments I’ve explored in a video game in some time, and its subversion of worn-out story tropes is nothing short of brilliant. Where most games make playing the hero about laying waste to your enemies, Creatures of Ava provides a needed counterpoint by showing that you can’t always be the hero, and not every story even needs one.
8/10
Creatures of Ava is available now on Xbox and PC, and is included with Xbox Game Pass. Inverse reviewed the game on PC.
INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.
