Creatures of Ava was provided by 11 bit studios for review. Thank you!
This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.
Creatures of Ava is an interesting game in terms of gameplay mechanics and premises. I haven't played one like this before, and there are both positive and negative aspects. But I think Creatures of Ava is a game everyone should check out to see if it will be their kind of game.
To cut out a lot of the exposition, the basic story is that the planet of Ava is dying, slowly being taken over by an infection known as the "Withering." As an employee of a corporation, our protagonist, Vic, is sent to the planet to rescue as many creatures as she can, transporting them to the "BioArk" before the Withering takes over completely.
This puts her at odds with the Naam, Ava's Indigenous sentient species, who have mixed opinions. Some take the threat of the Withering seriously, others plead ignorance of the danger, and others are aware but believe it is the natural course of things and should be allowed to run its course. Regardless, you will be tasked with carrying on Vic's mission, rescuing the creatures of Ava while teaming up with a Naam Archaeologist who is studying an ancient race that existed before the Naam.
Unfortunately, Fetch Quests seem to be one of the ways you'll attempt to save Ava. When you aren't directly capturing animals for the BioArk, you'll probably be running back and forth around the map collecting seeds, delivering items, or doing something else that's fairly mundane for one of the Naam whose planet seemingly has hours left to live. I'm used to quests like this in an MMO or even a regular RPG, but it grates on me a little more in an Adventure game.
If you can look past that, the gameplay loop in Creatures of Ava is OK. You'll mostly be exploring the region you're currently in, finding collectibles, using your staff to destroy the Withering, as well as healing infected animals in what is the closest this game gets to combat, which is essentially holding LT and occasionally pressing RT while dodging their attacks. It plays somewhat similarly to a Souls-like, except your attack is having a button constantly, and it's not quite as brutal.
The difficulty can be adjusted to be easier or harder than the Normal I played on, so I think the game is fairly accessible regardless of how difficult you want it to be. Normal will pose a challenge for most players later in the game.
Once an animal is cleansed, it calms down, and you can use your flute to guide it to a rescue-bot in a pied-piper style. If the animal isn't infected, you'll have to play a music/rhythm minigame for each type of animal to calm it, where you must play simon-says but with musical notes. They start pretty easy and gradually get more difficult.
I wouldn't say a deaf gamer wouldn't be able to play Creatures of Ava, but I did notice that when playing with my sound off, I found it harder to follow the on-screen prompts. Towards the end of the game, you can play around 10 notes you must memorize, although there is an accessibility option to show you the next note to play.
Puzzles also form quite a bit of the gameplay. However, they are pretty basic. Vic has 2 or 3 powers through her staff at her disposal, which she must use at various points to progress, and it's very apparent which skill you must use at each point. Perhaps the most difficult puzzles are those that require you to calm creatures. Using the correct creature's abilities, you can open up additional rescue points and new areas with more collectibles.
These vary from using a horse to charge down vines, using a wolf-like creature to bite through vines to lower bridges, and using a frog to jump over... vines so you can access an area... Yeah, there's a lot of vines in Creatures of Ava.
This, unfortunately, brings us to another problem I have with Creatures of Ava. As you rescue creatures from the planet, they will disappear from the game world permanently. So, if you rescued all of one species before doing a task that requires one of those species, then you just won't ever be able to do that task. The developers have stated this can never happen for story/main quests, but side quests and certain collectibles can become unobtainable if you rescue a species too soon.
So unless you are playing with a walkthrough guide, or you are checking every nook and cranny, don't expect to get 100% on Creatures of Ava on your first playthrough, you'll very likely be missing some collectibles, skills, and achievements by the time you finish the game. The game world is also broken up into 4 reasonably sized regions. However, once you leave a region, you can never return to it.
This, the developers say, is unavoidable because of the game's narrative, which I understand. Still, issues like these were overcome a very long time ago by a simple reworking of the timeline, such as the "point of no return" many RPGs have, where after the final boss, you are returned to a previous time to finish any side quests.
The game does warn you that once you leave a region, your progress for that region will be locked forever, but it's still frustrating that you have to stay in that part of the game until you find everything before you can progress if you want to 100% the game.
The main saving grace here is that Creatures of Ava is fairly short, like most games where the focus is on the narrative. You can finish the main story in about 7-8 hours, depending on if you beeline the main story quests or not.
There's also a skill system in the game, allowing you to improve Vic's abilities and stats, but I'll be honest: I largely found myself forgetting about it. It's nice to have and lends some extra sense of progression to the game, but it almost feels out of place in such a short game. The key skills are gained through story progression, so skill points are mostly spent enhancing your wand skills and making healing potions heal slightly more than usual.
While I have been quite negative about the game in some aspects, Creatures of Ava does have its charm. Its creatures are unique and cute, you can pet them all, even accidentally at times if they get in the way of another prompt! And the narrative world-building, for the most part, works well. Sometimes, voice acting has some oddities, but it doesn't take you out of the game. The visuals aren't impressive, but they're good enough and won't distract you. Music-wise, the game has good and calming ambient music that fits the game's theme quite well.
Creatures of Ava feels like a comment on Human arrogance to me. How humans arrive and come to "save the day," but their methods of doing so are misguided, or perhaps not even wanted at all, and the game does a good job of portraying that. The story itself is quite beautiful, and if you can focus on that aspect and aren't bothered with "completion," then you'll probably get a good amount of enjoyment.
Creatures of Ava starts off mostly positively. It supports 1280x800, so there are no black bars around the screen, and it has good controller support throughout the menus and gameplay.
By default, however, Creatures of Ava has all of its graphical settings disabled on the Steam Deck, with the developers opting to create and enforce their own graphical settings for Deck users. This is often a bit of a double-edged sword, as it can simplify things for many users, but it can also remove that flexibility that makes PC gaming so interesting.
I'm only offering 1 preset for Creatures of Ava, as it pushes the Steam Deck hard.
In your SteamOS settings, set an FPS Limit of 30 FPS / 60Hz, but we won't have a TDP Limit set.
You can disable the enforced graphics settings by using SteamDeck=0 %command% as a launch option for Creatures of Ava in Steam. However, upon further investigation, the default settings the developers have put in place for the Steam Deck are the lowest settings available anyway, which is wise, as the Steam Deck struggles to get beyond 30 FPS in this game. The only way to improve performance is to switch from TSR to FSR3 and enable Frame Generation, but as we're running at such a low frame rate, the input lag becomes unbearable.
Sadly, Creatures of Ava has performance issues on Steam Deck. The 1st region runs well, with a constant 30 FPS throughout and little to no stutters. However, once you reach the 2nd region, certain areas will drop to 23-25 FPS, and traversal stutter kicks in quite badly at points. The later regions of the game are more stable but still suffer from an occasional stutter.
So, ultimately, my advice is to run with the default settings chosen by the developers and deal with the frame drops and stutters that begin in the second region. There are performance issues on desktop PCs, so hopefully, the game will receive some optimization.
Creatures of Ava is greedy for power, and your Steam Deck will likely be drawing around 23-26W nearly all the time. Steam Deck LCD owners should expect no more than 1.5 hours of battery, and Steam Deck OLED users might just squeeze 2 hours if they're lucky.
It also runs the Steam Deck pretty hot, ranging from 75 to 85C. The fan spins up and is noisy throughout the game.
Creatures of Ava has some accessibility options, largely to help with the note-playing minigame, especially for those who are hearing-impaired. Letting you see the note to be played visually, and you can even enable seeing the note to be played next as well, to help your memory. All voice lines and dialogue are subtitled; by default, they are set to a large, readable font.
Creatures of Ava is a unique game. It aims to tell a conservation story from multiple standpoints, from a species coming in from the outside thinking they have all the solutions to the problem and a species who is perhaps prepared to let nature take its course and thinks these things should not be meddled with.
Creatures of Ava makes you think about things a little, even if certain aspects of the game attempt to distract you from the narrative that the developers seem desperate for players to follow. If you can overlook some of the things that are rough around the edges, such as dodgy collisions and some odd design choices, Creatures of Ava has an enjoyable narrative. I just wish it didn't come at the cost of some gameplay conveniences.
Performance on Steam Deck is a little disappointing, the game doesn't look good enough to be as challenging as it is to run, but those are the facts right now, be prepared for some frame drops and stutters that do tend to increase as you progress through the game. Is Creatures of Ava a great experience on the Steam Deck? No, it's not. Is it a playable one? Definitely.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Creatures of Ava controls well on the Steam Deck, but the game seems poorly optimized, leading to sub-30 FPS at points, as well as stuttering.
