THE SEED OF A MASTERPIECE
My first critical impression of AER: Memories of Old, developed by the Swedish studio Forgotten Key, came almost immediately — as soon as I pushed the controller sticks to move. It wasn’t great. The player character sprinted forward a little too eagerly, her running animation seeming barely tethered to the ground.
“How typically indie,” I thought. “But I’ll bite.”
I was controlling a young woman named Auk through a set of caverns in a tutorial setting, learning basic movement and absorbing scraps of lore. The game looked technically restrained, with low-polygon visuals that felt dated rather than deficient. The ambient soundtrack settled in, warm and unobtrusive, and I leaned back to relax.
Then, just minutes later, indifference turned to euphoria.
As I emerged from the caverns into the overworld, I stepped into what felt like heaven: a cluster of islands floating in a sun-drenched sky realm, suspended among towering cloud formations. In that moment, it became clear the developers knew exactly what they were doing. Since Auk — named after a real-world bird species adept at swimming — is not entirely human, that floaty movement was no accident.
A prompt appeared, instructing me to double-jump. I did — and before my eyes, Auk transformed into a bird. The animation was as natural as rain. Suddenly, I was soaring through the stratosphere. Whatever remained of the Earth below was swallowed by mist. The music, brilliantly composed by Cajsa Larsson, swelled into something celestial: gentle synth choirs paired with a playful banjo melody.
Regardless of what follows, that first seamless transition from ground to sky makes the game unforgettable.
Flying in video games is usually clumsy and imprecise, but AER nails it completely. Auk controls like second nature. You can take off from anywhere — even midair — and return to human form just as effortlessly, never worrying about the landing. She handles it intuitively, as if flight were her true state.
Further elevated by the soundtrack, this was among the most ecstatic moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game. Being able to leap from any ledge and plunge wherever curiosity pulled me felt like pure freedom. The sense of scale is staggering. New islands drift into view, biomes subtly alter the mood, and colossal cloud formations conceal unknown wonders, constantly calling you onward.
Unfortunately, there is a flipside.
There is not much game to AER: Memories of Old.
There are no enemies, no meaningful skill checks, no artifacts to uncover, and little sense of progression. The world is largely uninhabited, save for a handful of characters and animals. Flight exists purely for exploration — and once you descend underground, that defining mechanic is stripped away. And to finish the game, you must go underground.
In that sense, AER suffers from the same affliction as the first Assassin’s Creed: following the game’s objectives deprives you of its greatest strength.
Within the subterranean caverns, the gameplay shifts toward simple pressure-plate puzzles, light platforming, basic maze navigation, and piecing together the story of how the world shattered into floating fragments. Lore is conveyed through runes and frozen spirits revealed by shining a magical lantern upon them. Occasionally, a single written sentence appears — a fragment meant to slot into a larger myth.
The tale concerns benevolent animal gods elevating humanity to godlike status, only to be undone by human hubris. As for Auk herself, she remains almost entirely undefined. She is a silent vessel, uncovering ancient history that feels distant and impersonal — diluted echoes of myths we’ve heard many times before.
At the end of each cavern, you encounter an ancient deity. Each time, you expect a crescendo — a Shadow of the Colossus–style confrontation — but instead receive a brief monologue and quiet closure. I don’t inherently mind the lack of spectacle, but the lore is too thin to sustain emotional weight.
I wanted to love AER more than I did. After the initial rush, the experience began to feel hollow. Exploration remains magnificent — arguably the best I’ve ever seen in a game — and the world is undeniably beautiful. But it hides little of substance. The minimalistic visuals leave limited room for environmental storytelling, and the challenges never rise to meet the exhilaration of flight.
Running, jumping, navigating simple puzzles, and collecting fragments of lore feels restrictive when contrasted with the boundless freedom of the skies.
The game lasts perhaps three to five hours, depending on thoroughness — a mercy, given how little it offers beyond that initial revelation of flight. The audio design is one of its cornerstones, with subtle shifts in music that transform the world into a meditative space, a private pocket of heaven.
Still, knowing how little I truly discovered while exploring, I doubt that sensation would fully return on a replay. Instead, I find myself content to revisit the soundtrack on YouTube, letting memory do the rest.
I’ve been obsessed with dreams of flying for as long as I can remember. In the early 2000s, I hoped that Shadow of the Colossus’s creator Fumito Ueda might one day let us explore that world from the skies. Later, inspired by Alasdair Roberts’ folk song Waxwing, I imagined a game built entirely around flight and survival.
For years, such games never came.
AER finally broke that deadlock — and for that alone, Forgotten Key deserved to rule the world. They were sitting on a goldmine. With more content, more mysteries, and challenges designed around flight, this could have been extraordinary. Aerial predators to outmaneuver, ruins to uncover, soaring trials to master — not even traditional combat, just danger and momentum.
But the studio shut down in 2019, leaving AER behind as a fragment of what might have been.
Now it’s too late.
And it seems I’ll have to keep on dreaming.
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