AS AN UNBIASED THIRD PARTY I HAVE TO SAY - WOW this game rules. it is probably the best $20 i have ever spent in my life

Despite funding from the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, there's no way to rebind WASD or anything whatsoever. There aren't any battle speed options either. Hopefully, these premium, technological, and super futuristic features can be invented and then sold as DLC in our lifetime.

For an early access game, it's solid. For a demo, it's amazing. But for $22 it absolutely needs work to bring itself up to that value. What it does, it does right. The monster designs are cool, the music is fantastic, the art style is great, and the game feels like it has polish, it just needs to do way more of those things. There aren't quite enough monsters in each world to make successive runs feel unique to the last. You end up trying to do the same exact thing again but better, against way too many of the exact same groups from your last run, which isn't really how a roguelite should function. I was drawn to this as "doing what pokemon does but better" but at the end of the day it's no different than Pokemon's gameplay of mashing A to keep repeating the same actions over and over. The maps having some random generation to layout isn't enough variety to carry a game like this. There needs to be more monsters, more variety to the maps or the ability to skip a world if you've beaten it enough times (or just let me decide where I want to go), and more balancing so you're not just making the same squads every single run. In its current state, I can't recommend this game at $22, there's just not that much meat yet. /edit disabling comments because for some reason the fact that I dislike the game hurt people's feelings? lol

Creature capture game + roguelike don't work. Imagine you're playing Pokemon, you kill rattata pretty easily using tailwhip and scratch, then you reach Viridian Forest, and instead of fighting lvl 3 Caterpie, you have to fight a lvl 25 Butterfree who knows Psychic. You still have scratch and tailwhip. Obviously, that Butterfree lays waste to your lvl 6 Charmander. Now you have to start all over again with tailwhip, over and over again. That's this game. Combat is a slog. Every new run you have to use the equivalent of tailwhip, then maybe you get a skill or perk or item that seems cool, but since enemies quickly become twice as strong as you, they lay waste to you because all your skills are basically scratch and tailwhip.

There is a lot of potential here, let that be known. The art and music is lovely, the elements mechanic is cool and for an early access game there's plenty of content. As of now, I wouldn't recommend it though. My biggest annoyance is moving across the map; it feels very clunky, weird and kind of pointless. Especially the weird dashes on and from high ground feel bad. Another thing that just doesn't feel satisfying is how the game constantly tries to outbalance you, just for the sake of making you lose and buy the upgrades. I know that's a big part of roguelites, but the whole corruption mechanic and the insanely big jump of power creep from enemies in the 2nd area just feels like a bad implementation of the whole roguelite formula. Once again, I feel like this could turn out great and I'll keep playing, but the whole game just feels pretty off at the moment. Hoping the community will keep giving feedback and support the devs on their way of turning this into the game we all hope it will be!

Aethermancer! Moi Rai's at it again, with another complex teambuilding monster tamer game! Except this time, it's a roguelite! As a completely and totally and extremely unbiased alpha/betatester, I'd gladly say the game is awesome and if you like teambuilding games, you should definitely get this one, even if monster tamers aren't really your thing. At the time of review, the game just hit early access. Even then, there's already several full runs worth of content--3 biomes, 1 final boss, 28 monsters + shifting/shiny mechanic, difficulty adjustments/ascension ranks, and some toggles in the options to make mechanics easier. Generally speaking, if you played Monster Sanctuary, you'll find the teambuilding and general gameplay to be familiar. Not 100% the same, but very familiar. As a game, AE definitely feels like an iteration and refinement from what they learned off MS.

I CAN FINALLY TALK ABOUT THIS GAME!!! Beta tested for Aethermancer and absolutely in love with the game! Even in Early Access, there's so many different ways to play that I can just pick it up, play a run and test out something new. With the right traits and actions, you can reach some very absurd heights that just feel so good to hit. If you are a fan of exponential power scaling, stunning animation, wonderful monster designs and experimental team building, I very much recommend picking up Aethermancer! (Going to be buying it for some of my friends too, so they're not safe either.)

This is a game with a lot going for it that I really want to like, but it has a number of very unsatisfying/frustrating elements that make it hard to enjoy in its current state. To touch on the positives, most of the mechanics and balance around your monsters are pretty cool, enough thought has been put into the abilities and perk trees that monsters feel strong, unique and exciting to build around. I am excited to try out different compositions with different builds and I have also felt that I mostly end up with a team that is functional and interesting even if I didn't think it would work initially. Additionally, I think that a lot of what the player does in combat is fun and deep enough to maintain my interest, figuring out how to kill things is generally enjoyable. I also quite like the fact that the game is a roguelike and encourages you to play around with different teams because the majority of creature collector games get stuck in 'starter pokemon' syndrome and end up giving you more of an illusion of choice around what to use whereas this game really encourages variety (in some ways). I have seen complaints about the corruption mechanic, I actually think it is quite well done. I like the idea that your creatures have a form of attrition that encourages you to swap them out mid run. I think the effect of corruption is actually very minimal on the base difficulty because of how much restoration you get, but I think that reducing corruption restoration is a very nice way to increase the difficulty of the game in an interesting way. Onto my complaints with the game. I will start with the big one. I think that the UI is currently critically underdeveloped. My biggest problem with the game is that it is very unclear how the enemies work and what they are going to do on their turn. The important information is mostly available, but it is very inconvenient to access and I found myself mostly ignoring what the enemies were planning to do and 'hoping it wasn't going to be too bad'. I am not really talking about the actions displayed above their heads (although these could also be unintuitive at times), it is mostly an issue of the passives that you need to look in the inspect menu to see and especially the reset actions which I don't even know how you can see. I also couldn't see what order the enemy was going to act in, which ends up being very important for knowing what is going to happen and it was also not easy to keep track of all the buffs on enemies and their effects. I think the game would be drastically improved with a bit of additional clarity around all the things going on that isn't hidden behind several screens of menuing and possibly a feature that showed you the projected outcome of the enemies turn (like how you can see the projected outcome of your attacks) The most egregious offender of this lack of visual clarity was the final boss who appeared to me to just be throwing out random amounts of random attacks that I felt I had no way of predicting or playing around. (specifically when he triggers his reset action after being staggered for a second time, he took something like 7 actions when I was expecting him to take 3 and wiped my team through what I honestly thought was a pretty much impenetrable setup. I don't know what more I can do if keeping everyone full health and stacking 15 dodge on the whole team isn't enough). The other really big pain point for me is the way creature collecting and meta progression work in this game. I am not a huge fan of meta progression in roguelikes in general, even less so when it is directly tied to increasing player power through boring stat increases. I think its pretty stupid that the game should get easier as you get better at it. More importantly, specifically in this game, I don't like the fact that you need to use a limited use consumable to catch and unlock creatures. I have seen so many interesting creatures that I would like to experiment with using, but because I didn't have the consumable when I beat them, I am stuck with only the few early game creatures that I ran into before I ran out of consumables. These are the creatures I have already used and I don't want to use them again immediately. This might not ultimately be a big issue once you do 3-4 runs, but after finishing my first run it is a big pain point and the whole system just seems contrived and unnecessary. You don't have to make pokeballs in your roguelike, you already have the concept of monster souls which fit your game so much better. Final minor gripe, I don't really like the map traversal, it also feels contrived and unnecessary, like it just bloats the game. Overall, I think there is a good game in here. I loved monster sanctuary, and I can see sparks of the same brilliance in this game's design. It needs a lot more polish before I will truly be able to recommend this though. I also highly recommend taking a second look at some of the meta progression (including catching monsters) because it could definitely be cleaned up and the game would be better for it.

I want to start by saying that I do like the premise and gameplay loop (in theory) and the skeleton of the game is good. That said, to call current balance/implementation of certain elements an absolute joke would be an understatement. In order to put pressure on the player to die and restart the loop they added a "corruption" mechanic. Corruption is basically your monsters lose max health based on damage they take. This is totally not needed, though, because monsters easily out damage you. As an example, in the second area, my monsters still had max health bars around 35-40 (depending on which monster) and some enemies had AOE moves that hit my whole party and deal 28 damage. This means with corruption, it is almost a guaranteed party wipe if I don't have a way to full heal my party before they use this move. I also believe crit chance is bugged/broken. I got one of monsters to 75% crit chance pretty early in my first run and I only had 2 crits the entire run. The enemies, though, will crit you constantly. Also, on the point of balance, that same enemy with the full party 28 damage in the second area, also did a single target hit of 35, which means even without corruption, if all of my monsters were full health, that attack would be an instant kill on 2 of my 3. Then, lastly, enemies get health scaling naturally with levels, while you do not. So even though my level 5/6 monsters are struggling with sub 40 max health, these enemies that can easily one shot them, have 70 max health (they also get random turn resets and have multipliers/abilities like you get on level ups, so they are just baseline better than you full stop). I haven't gotten a lot of the upgrades yet, or leveled a lot of worthiness (which takes a while to increase on monsters), but what I have currently seen does not make up for these huge differences. The upgrades you spend Aether on are very pathetic, and worthiness on each monster is a complete slog to get, and you would need multiple levels of worthiness in order to reach the baseline power level of just the second area's monsters (maybe, it could take up to 10 worthiness levels depending on what you are comparing to). That would mean beating the first and second area upwards of 10 times with 3 monsters that somehow never die on any of the runs in order to keep getting them worthiness. I will keep playing because I like the general idea and it is satisfying enough for what I am looking for, but I can not in good conscience recommend this to anyone. If you have any concerns or doubts, Just play the demo, it is not that different. Edit: Just checked some enemy scaling. I have a level 4 Nosferatu (bat) that is a second area enemy and am currently in the second area on this run. Baseline the wind energy scream does 2x5 damage, but the enemy Nosferatu does baseline 2x8, so they are dealing 60% more damage than you in the second area while having up to double your health. They really, really want you to grind worthiness for your monsters for days. Edit 2: Also, the aqua pounce that the bat has is 3x3 when used by your monster, but 3x7 when they use it. That is 130% more damage than yours, the balance is completely broken in their favor. Instead of making a more compelling game for you to do more runs, they are relying on bad balancing to more easily kill you to force the additional runs.

TLDR: Seems like a good game, I just hate- rng pick 3 + multi-step synergies Monster sanctuary is my all time favorite creature collector. I am a big fan of the theory crafting that goes into building a team. Obviously you can look everything up but I really enjoy the beauty of finding cool new monsters that work with a strategy I'm interested in. I really, really hate when a game that wants powerful, niche interactions resorts to a pick 3 mechanic. I've been so excited for Aethermancer when I saw it was in development so I didn't spoil much. I thought it was going to be mixing something like the fan made game 'Poke Rogue' with Monster Sanctuary. And honestly this is pretty accurate except neither of these 2 games has a god damn pick 3 mechanic. Dont get me wrong, Vamp Survivors and Hades both are amazing but there is no strategically important multi-step synergies in either game. Both games have synergies but these are 2 or 3 powers you need to hit. I obviously didn't go too deep on this game but I can already see from my first run that synergies can be at least 10 powers deep and this is a 1.3 hour, surface level playtime. Although I love everything about Aethermancer other than the pick 3 gimmick; The inability to create cool team compositions without some serious blessings from RNGesus just reminds me of all the garbage pick 3 slop that already clutters Steam. I would have liked a MS tree with a quickload button to put a saved or default preset in instead of a pick 3 mechanic but maybe this is just me enjoying spending too much time looking at skill trees and there is a larger audience that just wants to run and gun. I think even a mix where you have 1 baseline monster specific skill tree with a pick 3 power that arrives every 5 levels or some shit would be fine. Its too much pick 3 for a heavy strategy game. The rng should be hunting the perfect base monster that completes the squad and getting powerful items equipped. edit: Poke Rogue has a pick 3 gimmick but its effectively non-consequential relative to the topic at hand Note to the devs: My compromise is to have an end game NPC or mechanic that allows a player to save a monster's current state and paste it into a later run when you obtain the same base monster. The current monster will only offer 1 pick 3 option and it will always be the option from the pasted monster when the pasted monster was obtaining a pick 3 at the same level. I can grind many runs and collect a few really interesting monsters and attempt to make some god teams or really unique synergies off of it. Sounds fun to me Maybe whenever you win a run you have the potential to save a monsters state for later use. IDK

For an early access, the game is good; as a purchasable product I think there's a lot of room for improvement. There are 3 main issues I have: 1. Movement/Traversal is tiresome because of the high ground mechanic. Moving around the maps/tiles to clear everything is awful because void dashing ruins your momentum and the highground is randomly generated so it can be finnicky or more numerous to traverse. 2. Enemy AI is not tuned perfectly. I've found that runs end randomly whenever I get unlucky with an enemy target selection or attack selection. Oftentimes, the enemy will launch an AOE attack with some degree of single target follow up, resulting in instant seemingly unavoidable death for one of your Summons. Even full tank with massive shields can die from an unlikely enemy high roll (Aether RNG, Attack RNG, and ordering). 3. Encounters are tuned too tightly and failure is super frustrating. The game is balanced around 3 synergistic summons, with gear, and traits making a loop of power. When one summon dies from the above scenario, it breaks this loop and your team falls apart. It is incredibly difficult to recover/play when a summon dies because they lose their equipment, you might get poor RNG for a replacement, and the actual combat you lost them in, will often end your run by itself. It's not a bad game, it's just not a product that I think is worth buying/playing right now.

I bought Aethermancer on a whim and WOW am I happy I did! This game is truly a perfect blend of Binding of Isaac (randomly generated maps + hardcore roguelike elements + slowly building your progression from experimental runs) AND Pokemon (creature taming + creature progression) in a way that I never knew I needed. All I can hope is that continuous content is released because this will be a staple game for years to come for ANY Pokemon-style fan AND/OR any Roguelike fan. Gameplay 11/10 Music 7/10 Graphics 6/10 Creativity 10/10 Will update once I have completed all content in game.

------------------------This is a early access game so as of 10/6/2025------------------------- Pros: This is a fun rouge lite/like, there is some variation in replays. Interesting world with interesting (unfinished) characters an monsters. Cons: Your monsters (momentos) are not going to be as powerful as the enemies you fight. The teams you try to summon are heavily subject to ballance issues, an unclear triggers. Poison seems to proc reliability, but weakness, terror, an burn seem to not proc when some effects would do so, IE: "When ally applies a weakness to enemy, apply burn." Combos didn't proc properly. Same with some buffs. (early access woes, maybe the wording needs to be re-written in the tooltip.) The only thing i find frustrating is the Corruption BS... like if i want to have a chance to even get to the final boss with out playing super healer teams.... is to bring the Mandragora (plant that has alot of passive corruotion reduction) With out the Mandragora, i have to start every fight healing with what ever aether (Mana/energy) i have.. meaning the enemy get a free round.... All in all, i feel like: "tanks" don't tank well enough with small shields. "Healers" Never have enough energy to keep up heals if there is only 1 "DPS" Is always having energy issues so its basic attack get energy nexty round attack with some thing special. "tactical" Or Aether interuptors..... again dont have enough energy to stop the final boss... Most runs i just quit now if i don't get Aether Generating passives/gear.... by stage 2, sure i COULD press on HOPING to get epics or better Traits... but hours spent feel wasted cause soon as i get to boss if im not generating 5 aether per basic attack then i cant interupt its abilities or poise... leading to it giving me corruption an making OP clones that have 2X more HP..... Hard can be fun, but if you don't have the Aether... you just lose.... no tactics no tanking/healing/DPS nope just loose just RNG telling me that i didn't get lucky an pulll the right Traits, or gear.... I tryed 1 run with 3 monsters, an my focus was on stealing Aether, an gear that had generator, my damage was Poison an what ever damage from steal abilities.... I got to the boss rather easily, but because the enemies summoned have the same abilties it was a losing tug of war.. So in closing, Its a good game.... for its value, BUT it is not finished and it showes... It needs more balance so that at the vary least players have a 50%~ of winning after 10 hours of play ((with out playing the meta))... or all i see happening is people will get frustrated/board an quit.... No point in having 20+ monsters if only 4-5 are the ones that actually have abilies to win the game... I will revisit this game in a few months, if the updates seem to have made improvments to the mechanics or balance.

I broke my "no early access games" rule for this It's a fun creature collector with a fair bit of depth (far more than just "use type X against type Y"). Emergent gameplay, multiple build options, and metaprogression.

While there is a ton of potential here, in its current state the game needs a lot of work. While in early access there is not too much here. The skeleton seems good but the gameloop is very short and easy to beat. Most vendor items are not worth it and only 1 equipment slot per monster feels like a strange decision. The corruption mechanic is not a great idea - it forces the player to pick corruption consuming traits on a tank in order to beat the game. No other build appears to be very viable without that, creating a massive balance issue. If a summon dies it is very punishing and basically ends the run even though you can replace it (the replacement will be far too weak). This leads to a gameplay loop of using the same few monsters and not bothering to resummon or rearrange the party. The game seems to be very unbalanced in its current state and honestly could benefit from having a 4 monster party instead of just 3. Momentos to capture new monsters are too rare. If you have a good run the chance you run out by the time you want to capture something is very high. Im sure this will be addressed in the future but right now its not a fun mechanic. Overall balance is poor, variety is very small, and corruption mechanic is not fun. As a huge monster sanctuary fan I am definitely disappointed but will revisit once the game exits early access.

Monster Sanctuary was peak so i blindly bought into this game. It's also peak.

Once again, Moi Rai comes up with a fantastic answer to the question: "Wouldn't it be cool if Pokemon had combat that was actually deep and interesting?"

Very fun mashup of roguelike and monster collector! I especially enjoyed the sprite work, dynamic music, and platforming aspects, even though those weren't the main 'selling point' - The good: Love the battle system, randomization of runs, and interesting mechanics. The balancing of Regenerate, Shield, Corruption, and Burn in particular, and how they each interacted with auto attacks was SUPER cool to learn and test with, and felt fresh, despite certain aspects mirroring things that we consider 'standard' and others subverting them. By having hover-able tooltips, even familiar names that I was not 100% sure about I could easily double check on, and I never felt punished for not knowing an ability name that was new to me. Some of the early depth came from just learning how things interacted, and it made me feel very invested, yet not overwhelmed enough to need to google for clarification. I do feel that Aethermancer is a lacking in depth at this point of early access- I was able to beat the 'final' boss on my 5th run, after encountering it for the first time on the 4th. That still took me around 10 hours, but I am also very familiar with this genre. The current roadmap addresses this, so I don't view it as a major detriment. I think that replaying with an entirely different team would still be a fresh experience for me, plus I haven't caught all the monsters yet! I just wish I had other bosses to look forward to, so I'm very glad that's on the roadmap! As a final note for the devs: I think I accidentally skipped over some of the character interactions dropping lore since it's so easy to skip dialogue in this game, even if it's brand new- so an adjustment to that (or a recap button to view the last few dialogues) might be nice, especially since it seems like a lot of the depth of the story is spoon fed in completely random NPC interactions, and it was easy to double click on accident.

If corruption hinders you, that's a skill issue.

Corruption just isn't a fun mechanic. Everything else about the game is great and if they figure a way to do something more with corruption it will be fine but as it is right now the mechanic in no way adds any fun to the game. I quite like corruption as a choice like for when you interact with the NPC or objects i do not think i would mind it as a difficulty modifier. But just having it stack as mobs hit you at least in the early stages of the game which is where you do not have any worthiness, traits and limited monster pool it just plain sucks.

I'm not really a "review" kind of guy, but I owe it to this company for the sheer amount of hours I've dumped into their catalog. It's also my first review, so that should speak volumes. As a heads up, Minor spoilers ahead for gameplay and unlockables. The game (as of time of writing) is in early access and it shows, both good and bad. A lot of extremely well developed ideas, art, and gameplay is on full display, but there is definitely room for improvement. I, as of time of writing, have everything unlocked/bought and an excess of retained resources and I do play with default corruption. I'll start with the negatives. -Non-combat exploration feels good in small doses, but tends to overstay its welcome after all monsters on a map are clear and the ability to fast travel to an otherwise discovered exit isn't possible. I'm not sure if that is a bug. -The map generation sometimes puts near invisible obstacles on the ground that are a bit frustrating to deal with. -Non-combat exploration's dash doesn't feel enough. Overworld monsters have a very forgiving "leash" time, and walking is more than enough. The dash stopping at a ledge I'm trying to jump down doesn't feel the best, nor does the linked dash between elevated platforms feel consistent. -(Some) NPCs are filled with lore, but "interaction" on a non-lore basis is minimal. -The only negative I have about actual gameplay (combat) is a general note on balance. I do want to say full-throatedly that balance is hard when there is as much depth that the devs are trying to achieve, but they've absolutely knocked it out of the park with previous titles. With that said-- --I never felt that really strong team comps required equipment or artifacts and that build/run defining traits/attacks were spread out across the monsters of that team such that I could reliably complete the game without worry. --Some middling comps are make/break and require many more defining traits or abilities or that only 1/3 of the monsters actually get the build defining skills or require a significant amount of luck to get passable equipment. I've scrapped many runs after struggling to get to the third area. --Some comps, even with shared non-tank archetypes don't feel like they jive well or that it takes significant work, planning, and luck to advance. --Incoming damage can feel extremely lopsided and grow faster than your mitigation. I've intentionally avoided using tanks as proper tanks in recent history. Tanks generally don't feel beefy enough even with intentionally stacking shield/avoidance/damage reduction later in the game. --Unlike some other roguelites, what I would call "player skill" has a much lower ceiling. Much more feels like a product of RNG. --The game, as a whole seems slow when I want it to be faster(the series of a hundred procs per turn), and fast when I want it to be slow (no transition/confirmation on item buy). With the entirety of all negative things I have to say out of the way, let's move on to the positives! -Build diversity is absolutely insane, especially with all of the QOL benefits that can be unlocked between runs. Even "bad" setups can be mostly passable until the third area with judicious artifact usage. -The monster design is top notch, even the shifted variants provide a different vibe and matches very well with the difference in archetype across variants. -The gameplay (if this is your shtick) is addictive. The loop is simple, like most roguelikes, but the difference in depth when you can't guarantee your team comps and you can really push a hodgepodge of thematically/archetypically clashing (on the surface) monsters into a cohesive win-con is something else. There's only 2 "must-haves" for maybe 3 different setups that I would consider "easy mode". Past that, I would never think that I am "owed" a win for a given team comp. -The lore, the pieces that exist, are fantastic and a very solid foundation to keep building a more cohesive world that feels much more alive. -The dev team. That's it. This team has pumped out some exceptional content and supported their previous titles well past a "reasonable" time after release/DLC roll-outs. While the number of negatives outweighs the number of positives, this is still very much a game that I will be playing in its current state, through EA, and beyond any content release. What this game does, it does exceptionally well, and you can see where the dev team has put scaffolding/framework in to further build this game for future content.

This game is an excellent follow-up from monster sanctuary. My only gripe is the variable of "corruption". Your runs are tied to your monster's HP always dropped everystage. You need to manage it either by having a healing support that can counter this, or to swap monsters through rebirth. I actually think this mechanic is really bad. It makes runs shorter and honestly not fun. I don't recommend this game as is due to this limitation. Otherwise, everything is stellar. Honestly I wished the company instead made monster sanctuary 2 over this style of game.

This games feels like a proof of concept. It works really well and gives you that new feeling as far as monster tamers go. surprisingly it does not feel like pokemon AT ALL which is a great thing. it honestly feels like it's own unique adventure. Really intricate battle system that doesn't Get Stale, beautiful pixel art and a decent sound track. There is enough variety to keep you entertained for a few hours and really digging into the possible build is a treat. My least favorite part of this would have to be traversal though. Something about how the character interacts with the environment feels off to me. When you are in battle you can tell a lot of attention to detail went in to make sure it looks and feels good. THE BATTLES ARE ABSOLUTELY THE HIGHLIGHT OF THIS GAME. On the other hand going through each biome isn't as tight and feels like something is missing. I think it's because you have the ability to bypass some encounters but doing so would leave you extremely handicapped by the end makes it feel like an illusion of choice since there are not an abundant of battles to be had in each Zone with I believe 3 being the maximum. The Size of each area compared to what is in each area seems a bit off. Overall I love the game though and would definitely recommend for anyone interested in monster taming, or Monster train slay the spire etc. Can't wait to see what else will be added. Maybe Npc battles ?

It's like if pokemon and slay the spire had a baby... and that baby grew up to become an amazing person that would ravish me in bed. Wonderful, no other notes!

Fun monster taming game with decent but not busted meta progression and fun builds to try out. Not super difficult early but ramps up later. Some builds need tuning but I can't wait until we get more monsters and especially player classes to change things up. Also how could I forget, the game in general is gorgeous. Well done to the artists!