Coming from the creators of Tinykin, Acornia: Mirror Worlds is a blend of top-down action RPG battling and running a shop, but to reduce it to such a description is to do it a disservice. There’s so much more invention and creativity that has gone into its world, characters and overall design.
The village of Acornia is in absolute shambles, wrecked after a cataclysm after a snowglobe was knocked onto the floor, rending it between the nice and harmonious dimension and a dark parallel world. With the townsfolk hoping to rebuild, Alva arrives to reopen her family shop, providing everything the people could possibly want.
It’s now a pretty familiar gaming setup: split time between adventuring to find items and resources, and then putting them out to sell to make the small, then medium, and eventually big bucks. For Alva, gathering fruits from bushes and then cooking them down into homemade jams to sell to the loggy populace of Acornia is a fine starting place, but adventuring will see her shake a magic snowglobe and teleport to the other realm for more base materials – wood, clay, sandstone, and all the rest. As you help the town to rebuild with resources you’ve gathered, more possibilities open up, to start growing fruits and not just the handful naturally growing, to reopen other shops like the grocery store, carpenters and plenty more.
Alva is a squirrel, and while the typical attributes you might think of would be having a big bushy tail and forgetting where they stashed their bounty of nuts in the autumn, Splashteam has decided to pick on a different attribute. Alba can store pretty much anything in her cheeks, which is very handy (if a little bit gross) for gathering materials, items and treasures that she needs for running her shop.
She’s essentially like a hyperactive Yoshi, inhaling anything and everything in sight and adding it to her inventory. Doesn’t matter if it’s cherries, bumblebees, dung beetles or anything else. It all goes the same place. Unlike Yoshi, it doesn’t come out the other end.
And it’s not just about gathering stuff for her inventory. There’s no swords, no shields or guns that Alva relies on while adventuring, she inhales items, and then can spit them out at enemies. You’ll want to be careful what you’re using as spitting ammunition, though, because anything in your cheeky inventory can be globbed at an enemy.
Where it gets really special, though, is that Alva can even inhale stunned enemies and spit them back out at their compatriots. You can get into a really satisfying flow of chaining together stuns and taking out a whole crowd of foes. The enemies aren’t especially smart, the section we played largely featuring scarecrow men and chickens laying explosive eggs. But that’s just giving Alva more explosive ammunition to use!
While flipping between dimensions is one way to find enemies to battle, there’s also much grander dungeons to go crawling through. These take the form of a string of floors or mini-levels to battle through, helping to keep the pace up with this bitesized approach, but also regularly featuring optional areas and puzzle room diversions to dip into.
Acornia: Mirror Worlds is quite delightful. It will certainly take more playtime for the shopkeeping and town rebuilding side of the game to grow, for the story to evolve, but there’s an immediacy to the adventuring and the combat, a charm to the animations and cartoon art style that has immediately grabbed me. Absolutely a game that I’ll be keeping an eye on.
