Creatures of Ava Turns Its Familiar Premise Into A Surprisingly Original Story
What if the world doesn’t need saving?
Video game protagonists have a weird relationship with nature. When you come across a wild animal in a typical action game, it normally means you’re going to have to fight the poor critter, or at least stuff it into a tiny ball to fight for you later. At best, animals can be used as your companions, again to fight at your bidding, with the rare exceptions of games like The Last Guardian that make them more equal partners. One game returning to Xbox Game Pass this month takes that gentler approach to its digital animals while telling a thoughtful story about learning to understand an alien culture.
Creatures of Ava starts with its protagonist, Vic, landing on Ava, a planet that’s doomed to be overtaken by a spreading sickness called the Withering. After teaming up with a local member of the native humanoids called the Naam, Vic sets out to capture and save as many of the planet’s animals as possible, eventually turning her sights to curing the Withering completely.
Creatures of Ava follows a researcher drawn into an entire planet’s fate.
It’s not a totally unfamiliar premise for a game. You parachute down to some foreign location, diagnose an issue that the locals are somehow unable to solve without your help, then get to work fixing their problems for them. But that’s not how Creatures of Ava plays out.
You spend a large chunk of the game following the plan that brought you to Ava in the first place. When you encounter a new species, you can learn a call that will convince them to follow you around, then lead them to a device that will teleport them directly to your spaceship for safekeeping.
Creatures of Ava is an animal-taming game with more going on in its story than it might seem.
Some animals have already been taken over by the Withering, making them hostile to anything in the vicinity, including Vic. Fortunately, Vic’s encounter with the Naam also left her in possession of a staff with the convenient power to cleanse the Withering. The effect is basically the same as Mercy’s healing beam from Overwatch — just point it at the infected critter and hold down the trigger until its healing energy cures them, only in this case you’re dodging attacks from the enraged enemy itself rather than from an opposing team. As you play more, you’ll get upgrades that let you cleanse and dodge more effectively, but these sections aren’t really the meat on Creatures of Ava’s bones.
After charming a creature, you gain the ability to control its movements directly, which leads into the game’s puzzle-solving side. You’ll need to use each animal’s special abilities to move through the environment. The world of Ava is strikingly gorgeous, so even when the game’s mechanics aren’t doing anything particularly new, it’s a joy just to move through this alien planet and see everything it has to offer.
Learning from the local Naam makes Vic’s story much more interesting.
Where Creatures of Ava really shines, though, is in its story. As Vic goes about her work, she helps pass a message to neighboring groups of Naam that it’s time for a reunion. Despite the world-ending threat facing them, the Naam seem unconvinced by Vic’s plan, and she hopes that by helping them, she’ll be able to talk them into evacuating. What happens instead is that Vic comes to learn that there’s more to Ava and the Naam that she thinks, and maybe assuming she knows what’s best for them isn’t actually doing them any favors. The interactions between the Naam and Vic also provide for plenty of humor in the game’s near-apocalyptic story, as the people of Ava are endlessly amused by the anxious and overconfident human in their midst.
Creatures of Ava walks a fine line between falling into common gaming tropes and subverting them. Despite her seeming role as lone savior of the Naam, Vic’s real story lies in understanding that she doesn’t know everything and coming to see the people of the world as being as competent and clever as she is. Creatures of Ava isn’t always thrilling in its moment-to-moment creature taming, but its smart twist on a familiar story makes it an original adventure worth tackling.
