Aether & Iron Review
Aether & Iron mixes noir storytelling, tactical hover-car combat, and a floating decopunk New York into one of the year’s most distinctive RPG settings.
Aether & Iron. Credit: Seismic Squirrel / Chaos Theory Games
Aether & Iron immediately caught my interest thanks to its setting and noirish tone. Exploring a decopunk 1930s New York that’s literally stratified into scattered floating islands as a smuggler with a Sam Spade vibe is a strong pitch. Seismic Squirrel’s game leans into it with sharp dialogue, excellent voice acting, and a fascinating world. The problem is that the static presentation never lets the world feel as alive as it should.
You are Gia Randazzo, a smuggler pulled into a growing conspiracy involving the aether technology that keeps the city afloat and powers your car, class struggle, and corruption. The writing commits to noir cynicism while maintaining an emotional core. Conversations have personality, side characters stand out, and the game does a great job making its floating-borough version of New York feel like a character in itself. The setting has history baked into it, and you can feel it.
Disco Elysium feels like one of the game’s biggest inspirations, especially with its bleak setting, dialogue-heavy structure, and skill checks. Disco Elysium worked because walking through Revachol created intimacy with the city and made the setting feel lived-in and alive. You explore Aether & Iron’s New York through visual novel-style screens and dialogue hubs instead. It keeps the pacing brisk, though it keeps the city at arm’s length. I felt like I only half-experienced the world through someone else’s Instagram feed. I kept wanting something more tactile and alive.
Aether & Iron. Credit: Seismic Squirrel / Chaos Theory Games
Aether & Iron. Credit: Seismic Squirrel / Chaos Theory Games
Battles play out as tactical hover-car chases where lane management and positioning are critical. Sliding into another lane to avoid hazards while lining up a shotgun blast from your side-mounted weapon feels great. Bumping enemy cars into crashes is crunchy. AP management creates a nice push-and-pull between aggression and survival, especially once enemy cars start boxing you in with overlapping firing angles. The constant movement gives fights a sense of momentum most turn-based RPG combat lacks.
I got frustrated with the dialogue skill checks. Rolling against conversations and investigations should create tension, though I regularly felt like I was losing checks more often than the displayed odds suggested. Whether I just had terrible luck or the odds were skewed, the result was the same: important conversations sometimes felt frustrating instead of dramatic. You’re clearly not supposed to save scum, though the save system also makes doing it annoying enough that I gave up pretty quickly. If you’re going to stop me from cheating, at least be direct instead of tedious.
Still, I kept wanting to see what happened next. The art direction is fantastic, the soundtrack fits the smoky noir tone perfectly, and the writing carries enough momentum that I pushed through the friction. Aether & Iron never reaches the level of its biggest inspirations, but I wanted to stay in its New York longer. That’s the most disappointing thing about it. I just wish it felt less static and more alive.
Aether & Iron
Aether & Iron delivers sharp noir writing and satisfying hover-car combat, but its detached presentation keeps its world from feeling fully alive.
