Review | Worlds Of Aria - A Roleplaying Oneshot In Digital Form
Between its tabletop game inspirations, reliance on dice rolls, and promise of player choices with meaningful consequences, I was naturally drawn to Worlds of Aria once I caught wind of it. I’ve developed quite a fondness for tabletop gaming, but rarely have opportunities to partake in them with friends in real life. So, I’m grateful for titles like the critically acclaimed Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper for offering single-player adventures which translated concepts that could easily have worked as pen-and-paper RPGs into a digital medium.
Worlds of Aria isn’t too dissimilar to those examples, but the key difference is that it’s billed primarily as a co-op multiplayer game (albeit one that can still be enjoyed solo). The goal of French developer Ludogram is clearly to recreate the chaotic camaraderie you’d see in a traditional tabletop RPG. To offer an experience of going on an adventure where success is determined by a mixture of skill and dumb luck, and players can try to collaborate like a well-oiled machine or try to take the story off the rails. On one hand, Worlds of Aria succeeds in that goal, but it is unfortunately not the most compelling TTRPG video game out there.
Worlds of Aria’s story is split across four acts, which in turn are comprised of eight chapters. Each chapter has your band of four party members go through various scenarios, all of whom can individually choose any of the available actions to progress the story. So, if the path splits, three players can opt to go one way but the remaining fourth can go the other. Two players can choose to fight a gang of enemies while the other two can flee for their own safety. While you are obviously limited in the kinds of decisions you can make, there’s enough freedom on offer to encourage replaying chapters to see how events can play out differently. I only had time for one run through the whole game, but it’s evident there’s a nice range of outcomes, both in the short-term and the long-term.
The whole game is extremely simple to get to grips with. You click and drag your character’s minifigure to one of the highlighted areas to make a decision, you click and release the dice for when you need to roll them, and you can drag items to your character to place them in your inventory. The limited inventory space also means you won’t be inundated with near countless equipment and items, and party members can easily drop or trade items with each other should the need arise. It’s the same with gold, which is used for buying items, though bafflingly you can only take out one piece of gold at a time. Since the inventory screen also automatically closes when you do this, putting money down to buy items becomes rather arduous (especially if you’re playing solo like I did). An option to just pay the full amount in one go would’ve been a welcome quality-of-life touch.
Some actions require skill checks, where a dice roll determines whether you succeed or fail. Interestingly, Worlds of Aria handles this slightly differently since high rolls are actually a bad thing. The way it works is characters’ skill stats are measured in percentages and the aim is to roll within that percentage. For example, if you want to succeed at a knowledge check and your character’s knowledge skill is at 35%, you want to roll 35 or less to pass. Sometimes, there’ll be additional difficulty modifiers that can increase or hamper your chances. It may sound a bit weird, but you get used to it in no time. The game also has critical successes and critical failures, meaning you can earn yourself a bonus for rolling a 10 or less, but rolling 90 or above is borderline disastrous and leads to even more lost health.
Character stats can be upgraded with the stars you earn for clearing objectives, which are rewarded to players at the end of each chapter. While this does improve your odds, skill checks are ultimately determined by luck. It can be frustrating to fail at checks you should’ve easily passed, but you’ll undoubtedly cheer at clearing especially difficult ones. Admittedly, there isn’t much range in the potential outcomes of dice rolls, but that can be forgiven considering this is a video game. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, while directly based on Dungeons & Dragons, could only do so much within the limitations of programming as opposed to a traditional TTRPG where the only limitation is a person’s imagination.
With the number of choices available throughout Worlds of Aria’s four acts, there’s a clear incentive for players to go through chapters again to discover different outcomes. The list of objectives for each chapter also teases at some of the possibilities and characters retain their stat upgrades even on replays to help give you an edge. Plus, while chapter length does vary, they’re all pretty short, so it’s barely a hassle replaying them when on the hunt for specific outcomes.
The game also frequently teases players with opportunities to betray the rest of the group, typically to gain some kind of stat advantage, or item, or to simply avoid taking damage. As a solo player, this was never a problem for me, meaning I could explore multiple options or keep everyone on the same page. This would obviously be more impactful in a game with multiple players, though given Worlds of Aria is largely a collaborative experience, deliberately double-crossing the rest of the party just seems like it could generate bad blood, even if the result can benefit the group later. The game doesn’t always allow players to talk through all possible actions, though, since some sections are timed, resulting in a mad dash to get everyone’s characters in place to avoid whatever the game’s about to throw at them.
A string of poor choices or dice rolls can see characters’ health dwindle rapidly, and there are some occasions where a character can be taken out of the game in an instant. This happened to me as early as the first act’s fifth chapter, where three of my party members, who were disguised as villainous minions, were forced to kill the fourth. And yet this wound up not being as dire as I had assumed since, on the character select screen, there’s a medallion icon you can click to resurrect dead characters. I was given an ominous warning suggesting there would be some serious ramifications for this, but all it really does is lock you out of an achievement. So, I was able to bring dead characters back constantly throughout the adventure, assuring I had the same band of four from start to finish. Their stat upgrades didn’t even reset upon death and while they did lose their entire inventory, they drop it upon dying, allowing other party members to keep hold of it and give it back upon reviving.
This apparent lack of consequences is the least of Worlds of Aria’s problems, though. While mechanically sound and offering plenty of replay value, its overall aesthetics and storytelling isn’t particularly captivating enough to warrant playing through it all more than once. Having the adventure be depicted as a tabletop game, complete with minifigures for your party members and cardboard standees for NPCs, is an admittedly charming visual aesthetic. Although seeing the figures clip through the scenery whenever they move is jarring. I initially thought it was a visual bug when my party descended through the floor until I realised that’s just how the game depicts going down a hole. On top of that, none of the music (barring maybe one track) really stood out which when combined with the unsatisfying sound effects means every scenario feels deprived of energy.
As for the storytelling, it’s unfortunately pretty bland in every aspect. Aside from a few neat twists throughout, particularly towards the very end, Worlds of Aria’s plotline is nothing you haven’t seen before. This wouldn’t be so bad if it had some fun dialogue and character writing to balance it out, but out of the 12 possible playable characters to choose from, none of them have any distinct personality despite what the game claims. There are voiced lines for selecting actions, rolling dice, etc., but there’s no bespoke dialogue during the story, making everyone sound exactly the same when interacting with NPCs or each other. The only thing to distinguish them are their starting stats (but any character can be upgraded to focus on any specific stat if you want) and their unique abilities, which can be activated before rolling dice for skill checks. However, many of them function similarly as dice roll modifiers, with only very slight differences between them.
Efforts have been made to make the world of Worlds of Aria not just another cookie-cutter fantasy setting, but I don’t think they’re particularly effective. There’s plenty of comedic dialogue throughout and attempts at subverting expectations, but every joke feels like a first draft; like people shouted out the first idea they came up with and they just ran with it with no refinement. For example, the queen of Aria speaks with a lisp… and that’s the whole joke. There’s a guy who runs a food stall selling chicken skewers yet dresses like he’s from modern-day… and that’s the whole joke. One of the royal guards is always drunk… and that’s the whole joke. Maybe if the development team had pushed the boat more and got really weird with the worldbuilding and characters, things would’ve been more impactful. I maybe gave out the lightest of chuckles two or three times, but I was otherwise stone-faced throughout. Successful or failed dice rolls got more of a reaction out of me. You could argue the story isn’t really important since this is a multiplayer game, and a group of players will be more focused on gameplay and their own interactions. A nuanced, in-depth story could’ve felt intrusive for multiplayer sessions. Yet there still should’ve been something more to it. If the situations players get into and the characters they meet aren’t particularly engaging, they’re going to lose interest.
Corny jokes and barebones dialogue can be bolstered with fun voice acting, but despite the game’s dedication to TTRPG-inspired visuals, there’s no game master to provide any running commentary or reactions to player decisions. There is a narrator voiced by Laura Bailey (one of the most prominent voice actors in the business), but she is woefully underutilised. She only ever pops up in-between chapters to set up what comes next and while she’s by no means phoning it in, what dialogue she has is incredibly basic, giving her little room to inject any personality. Any other voice actor could’ve filled in for her and delivered the same performance. Having an ever-present narrator yucking it up throughout might have been intrusive during co-op play, but it would’ve gone a long way to injecting more life into Worlds of Aria’s setting and characters.
Despite my complaints, there was still something narratively satisfying seeing a bunch of supporting characters return for the final act and experiencing the ramifications of some of my less-than-scrupulous actions. I also found the game to be mostly bug-free, barring a few instances where it froze, and I had to force a shutdown. Fortunately, the game autosaves so I never lost any progress. Although the game didn’t seem to like a specific choice I made at the end of one chapter since it kept freezing until I opted to do something else. The party member’s minifigures also sometimes don’t lock into place even when you set them on top of the designated areas for making choices. I don’t know what was causing this, but one-timed instance led to a character losing health they should have easily avoided.
With the right group of people, Worlds of Aria could make for a very enjoyable co-op experience. However, I feel most players’ entertainment would come from each other’s company and the natural thrill of rolling dice rather than the game’s contents. It can be worth playing through once since the whole adventure isn’t super long (Ludogram estimates an average 11-hour runtime), but I can’t imagine many coming back to it a second time.
