Ark of Charon

We’ve all heard the age-old story. The tree of life has been engulfed by darkness, resulting in its demise. But alas, there is hope. A gaggle of Golems has located a new seed. It’s now your job to properly grow and defend this new world tree of life. Oh, and the old tree of life, it is still out there, and its full of evil. Alright, perhaps not so tale as old as time, but the premise to Ark of Charon feels like a solid idea for a game on the surface. I also really dig the idea of a tower defense game mixed in with a colony simulator with a lot of resource gathering and management. All while looking like this game that at times feels like it belongs in a Studio Ghibli animated film. Ark of Charon is a fun, once-in-a-while title that doesn’t feel like it holds up after a few hours.

Let’s talk about looks first. I’m more of an inner beauty guy myself, just look at my profile picture. At a distance Ark of Charon looks very colorful. The water color-style backgrounds are pretty. Even the use of dark colors, and the contrast between the bright days and dark nights is good. But the more you zoom in - and I tend to play completely zoomed in - issues arise. Up close the visuals wear down, become cloudy in a sense. To be frank, it can look like a game that belongs on a phone screen or tablet. I’m ok with that. I think the developer might have made a misstep by making this a PC title; I would love to play this on my tablet in my bed for an hour before going to bed each night.

Base building is peaceful, almost relaxing. You send your Golems out to do your bidding, gathering material to build onto your tree to both make the next gathering day easier, and to build up defenses for the nightly attacks. This gathering portion tended to be the bigger part of the gameplay loop. The time and freedom to build as you see fit is welcoming. My biggest issue with building was its practicality. Ark of Charon wants you to come up with something inspiring and groundbreaking. I don’t have that kind of inspiration in me. In Minecraft, for example, I build boxes, and then bigger boxes.

I found the tutorial and introduction to be very figure-it-out-yourself. The tool tip will tell you to gather materials, but not how to go about it. And the clock is ticking. The next tool tip will talk about using your Golems to gather, and how to go about that. Not that I couldn’t decipher what needed to be done, there's just not much push to teach me how to play. Any help tip that pops up only does so once, so make sure not to click away too fast or you are up a creek.

At the bottom of your screen are your controls. Everything is click menu. Again, this would work perfectly as a touch-screen tablet game. It almost seems like they were going that design route and made an abrupt turn to PC. You click the mine button, and then you drag your mouse across the area you want the Golems to mine. It is that simple. It is also easy to set yourself up for failure by digging too deep or being too greedy about you gather. I feel you can set yourself up and dig too deep early on and pay the price in the first few rounds of night attacks.

There are 15 different control options on your screen, and most of those have sub-menus within those menus, and more options to choose from. You choose building, there are so many options on what you can build. I think the menus are handled just fine; they work, but they feel a little too old fashioned for my taste. Once again, I would find this acceptable on my tablet, but it is a little annoying on my PC. Don’t know why I have this conclusion, maybe years of playing games has made me a bit jaded. I expect more from a PC title then I do an app on my phone. 

My first seven or eight runs could be summed up in one word, disaster. The second part of the gameplay loop is defending your tree from the onslaught of nightly attacks. I think it took seven or eight attempts for me to make it into the second zone. I was bad at Ark of Charon at the beginning, but it will probably take you a few to get there too. I like a difficulty curve. I even feel like Ark of Charon is a fair, steep curve. Getting into the next zone felt rewarding when I could finally do it.

The tower defense portion feels a little underdeveloped. You can fire weapons yourself, or load ammo up and have the tree do it. You need to be the one defending the tree in the beginning, you just can’t mine enough material early on. I do not care for the manual controls, even with the pin-point precision the mouse gives. I don’t think using a touch screen would have helped, maybe a little more give to my aim would have made it more satisfying. 

Ark of Charon feels like it is missing something that I struggled to nail down. It might have to do with the lack of story. Your job is to protect and see this tree of life mature, and not much else. It might be the easy to learn, but the game feels almost impossible to master. The art that looks great far away and a jumbled mess up close. Menu upon menu that just feels unintuitive and dare I say it - lackadaisical. There is room to grow, perhaps not on the tree itself, but again, you can always move up instead of out. Ark of Charon has the foundation to feel like a real, challenging title but too many missteps will lead this Early Access title to stay downloaded in my library, but rarely called upon.