Worlds of Aria Review – Review
A D&D party for your D&D party.
Something I found fascinating when I first tried playing a tabletop RPG was how little I as a player actually needed to know. A good game master can usher a party of brand new players through an adventure, facilitating their requests within the confines of the rules even if the players themselves aren’t quite sure what they’re doing. Worlds of Aria is a self proclaimed Dungeons and Dragons-like that seeks to bring that same level of accessibility to a lighthearted take on tabletop RPGs.
Worlds of Aria can be taken on alone or with a total of up to four players either locally or online. Any vacant spots will be filled by CPUs that can be managed by the human players. It is worth noting that these characters have no AI of their own. Rather the player character simply inherits them as extra characters. So if you are playing solo you’ll be managing all four members of your party. For my wife and I who were playing together, we each wound up assigning ourselves one of the two remaining party members to manage.
The story unspools as a series of narrative vignettes. As dialogue plays out you’ll occasionally have opportunities to make choices that will affect how the story goes forward. You may, for example, be confronted with a guard who you can choose to fight, bribe, sneak past, or offer a drink to. The entire party doesn’t have to agree either, and each player is free to take their own action. Individual character stats will also factor into the likelihood of any given action to succeed. This is represented by a percentage displayed next to each character’s icon above the action in question. Other times an action’s chance of success may be entirely dependent on what other characters do, leading to a massive number of permutations at any given time.
Success or failure is determined by a skill check rolled via percentile dice (a pair of ten sided dice). The higher your stats on a given skill, the higher your percentage chance of success. For example, if you have a 75% chance of success, you will need to roll a 75 or lower in order to pass the check. It is a very simple and easy to understand system. The only other contributing factors to your rolls are each character’s unique powers. These can only be used a select number of times throughout your campaign but have a chance to significantly alter your roll. The wizard I played as could draw a card from a deck that would have a negative or positive number on it. This number would then be added to or subtracted from my roll. Once I used a card, it was gone for good. My wife played as a pirate who had a similar power but each use cost one gold coin. One of our other characters had a power that could only be used three times in the entire campaign, but guaranteed them the best possible result on a roll. There are no complex combat mechanics, just a simple percentile roll for every situation. Part of me did wish for some more complex rolls just to spice up gameplay a little, but on the other hand, it keeps Worlds of Aria extremely accessible to everyone.
One area where things do get tripped up a little is in its user interface. The entire game was very clearly built with a mouse and keyboard in mind; mapping to a controller feels a little inconsistent. At times you’ll control a freely moving cursor (emulating the PC experience) but other times you’ll awkwardly shift to that same cursor being hard locked to specific UI elements. There were times where I’d struggle to get it to line up with a small button on screen to open a character’s inventory, while other times it would continuously snap to different areas but never the one I was aiming for. Most of the time this was a mere inconvenience, but during a few timed decision prompts we actively struggled to get characters positioned on the correct choices, especially considering that we were each managing multiple characters. I did also notice a couple instances in which when trying to drop an item into my inventory, I accidentally dropped it behind the UI element instead and then couldn’t pick it back up because that element of the UI was in the way.
Worlds of Aria is a highly accessible, well written, tabletop inspired adventure. It can make for a fun adventure with your regular party (near or far), or an intro to people who are completely unfamiliar with this style of game. Veterans may find some mechanics a bit too simple to get heavily invested in, but it’s clear that isn’t Worlds of Aria’s goal. It is definitely at its best the more human players you have, as empty slots ultimately just become extra characters for your party to manage in addition to their own. The UI is a little clunky and can take some getting used to. But Worlds of Aria is ultimately a charming adventure that bridges the gap excellently between tabletop RPG and party game.
