When I first sat down with Aether & Iron, I couldn’t have guessed how the demo would end. As soon as I laid eyes on the RPG at the Indie Media Connect (part of the Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco, I clocked a Disco Elysium influence.
Dialogue plays out in a column on the right, complemented by on-screen dice rolls and italicized narration. And as a Brandon Sanderson fan, its 1930s noir-inspired aesthetic instantly reminded me of the covers of the Mistborn Era 2 books, but far from the ground where those fantastical detective novels take place.
The Underworld Above The Earth
In this “DecoPunk” RPG from developer Seismic Squirrel, New York City now floats in the sky thanks to a mysterious substance called aether, as do the cars transporting its denizens from concrete island to concrete island. You play as the down-on-her-luck, Gia Randazzo, a hard-boiled smuggler in a fedora and a trenchcoat. As the game begins, she picks up a job transporting a naive young woman named Nellie through the aerial underworld. Soon after I secured Nellie, I got to the part of the demo that really surprised me: the car combat.
Until then, Aether & Iron had been straddling the same middle ground as Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper, half RPG, half adventure game. You click around an environment to investigate objects, talk to (or intimidate) people, and find leads. You roll dice and spec into certain skills. So, when I found myself in the middle of a tactical grid as our roadster sped down an aerial highway, the shock hit me as hard as an aether air bag.
Apparently this idea was where Seismic Squirrel started. The rest — the Art Deco aesthetic, the on-screen dice rolls, the hard-boiled noir dialogue — all sprung from a desire to make, as narrative lead Tyler Whitney says, “a strategy game with cars.”
I didn’t get the most in-depth look at these mechanics — just one fairly quick battle — but it seems to essentially work like tactical combat in a game like Fire Emblem. You move around your enemy, seeking an advantageous position to ram or blast them with your shotgun. The key difference, though, is that you need to keep an eye on what’s coming down the street and where your opponent’s car is about to veer off to.
Exploring New York History
Stories set in New York can sometimes feel like they’re opting for “Default American City,” but I was impressed by the specific details Whitney mentioned when discussing the setting.
“There are some wild stories about what happened in New York in the late 19th, early 20th century,” Whitney says. He and his team would pore over that history, find the “almost unbelievable stories,” then reimagine them as science fiction. “Have you ever heard of the White Wings?” Whitney asks me, alluding to the “almost paramilitary garbage men” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“This is why currently in the Sanitation Department in New York all the ranks are military. At the very beginning they had stark white uniforms, military helmets, and they had to perhaps violently persuade people to allow them to clean the city.”
So Seismic Squirrel took that idea and turned it into a major faction in the game.
That’s incredibly cool, and the demo was one of the most stylish things I played at GDC. So far, Aether & Iron looks like an inspired spin on the formula Disco Elysium popularized and I can’t wait to go hands-on with the full game when it launches later this year.
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