However, as I played through Aura I had to wonder if I was still playing an adventure game or if I had mistakenly loaded up a puzzle game I didn't know I had on my desk. This game is puzzles and puzzles and yet more puzzles from the beginning, with a very light story seemingly added to it. But lets move on to describing part of my day one experience.

I sit down and boot the game up, and I find that it has a rather intuitive interface. After a few clicks here and there, I was able to move around the world and figure out how to interact with objects and access my inventory. That's a very good thing. The game then opens up with a story that is a bit generic as far as fantasy stories go. You play the role of Umang, and are entrusted by your mentors to protect four rings of power. You spend the game trying to stop the villain from getting them. To do this, Umang is going to be traveling through different worlds in search of artifacts that will allow him to unlock the power of the rings. The music at this point is very decent, and I'm kind of getting excited about it. Even though the story is your generic 'save the universe' story, so far the game is doing a great job of drawing me into it.

So, I arrive to the first world. Of course, my gaming instincts kick in and I save, save, save. I find a note that is intended to give me some sense of direction, and yet it fails miserably at it. Because as I stare at the room in front of me, I'm left to wonder what exactly I should be doing to achieve what the note wants me to do. From here it's puzzle time! So I start working on the first puzzle.

I flex my brain muscles, and I start working on the puzzles. To Aura's credit, the puzzles or most of them kind of make sense. However, there are a lot of puzzles where you're left facing a funny looking machine that is obviously some kind of piece of technology that our human minds aren't familiar with and your only choice is to try out different buttons, levers or item interactions in order to make it work. The game does have a journal of sorts where you record hints as you go along, but honestly I didn't find the hints that helpful. There were some very nice animations that although pretty to look at, still weren't enough reward for the puzzle solving. The characters were not really very memorable. The story never seems to pick up form its generic start and is not compelling enough to make the insane amount of puzzles bearable.

Like most games of this kind, there's a lot of pixel hunting here. The crisp graphics helps make this aspect of the game a little easier to handle. There are some rooms, though that are simply too dark and it becomes very hard to make out the details, even with my contrast and brightness cranked up. The fact that the technology in the game's worlds is very alien in nature makes sense from a storyline perspective, but works against you, making it hard to figure out what each object is supposed to be doing.

I have to say, the game seemed to run quite smoothly for me. Hardcore adventure/puzzle games might find a good time in this game. To those that may be looking to get into the genre or are not familiar with it, I wouldn't recommend this game to. You've seen me mention puzzles a lot through this review and there's a good reason for it. The game is really more a puzzle game passing for an adventure game than an adventure game with the required puzzles. The puzzles although logical in most cases, tend to depend on images that are very good at exciting the imagination, but not very good at conveying their nature to the gamer. Aura: Fate of the Ages is a good brain exercise, but in the end I didn't find it a very fulfilling one.