Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom Review

A cozy perspective puzzler that charms without challenging.

Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom is the debut title from Shatterproof Games, and it draws pretty clear inspiration from the Monument Valley series. That whole "perspective is everything" style of puzzle game, where rotating your view of the world opens up paths that wouldn't exist otherwise.

This influence is something the creators have acknowledged, yet the objective was not simply to imitate their success but to take things further by incorporating additional mechanics into the mix. It is up to the individual player how well the developers have succeeded in this endeavor. What is more important is whether the player is ready to deal with an easy-to-play game rather than a challenging one.

Although Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom launched on Steam in June 2024, the game is now available on Nintendo Switch, macOS, Google Play, and the Apple App Store, offering a broader audience the opportunity to experience its puzzling gameplay. Its modest price, which is about seven dollars depending on the platform, clearly indicates what sort of experience this game will provide.

It is not designed to offer an exhaustive and extensive gaming experience to the player. It is a rather small, compact puzzle game designed to be easy and enjoyable to play. And mostly it manages to do so.
The story puts you in the shoes of Aarik, a young prince whose kingdom has seen better days.

He was left with only the king's crown, since his father, the king, is sick in bed with an unknown illness, and his mother, the queen, has been lost ever since she decided to set out on her own adventure to find a cure for their kingdom. But the crown wasn't just any old crown.

It holds magical gemstones that grant him real power.

Those powers are exactly what he'll need to piece the world back together and track down his family.
The story unfolds quietly. There isn't much dialogue to speak of, and what little exists is enough to nudge the plot forward without overloading you with lore.

The world does a lot of the storytelling on its own; you can see the decay and ruin that's spread across the kingdom just by looking at the environments around you, and each area has a distinct visual personality that conveys a sense of what the kingdom once was. Between worlds, you get brief playable segments where you take control of the Queen, watching her push forward just ahead of Aarik.

And it works very well, too, because there's always going to be an element of trying to catch up to her, as though each new puzzle solves that distance between the two of you. With respect to what the player is actually doing in Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom, the most prominent mechanic is rotating the camera. The game is viewed from an isometric angle, and you can spin the world around you in 90-degree increments.

When you do, things that looked completely disconnected- two separate platforms, a broken bridge, floating pieces of architecture- can suddenly line up and become passable. Aarik can walk across paths that technically don't exist in three-dimensional space, as long as they look connected from where you're standing. It's the kind of thing that sounds confusing in description but clicks almost immediately once you start playing.

Controls on Switch use the L and R buttons to rotate the camera left and right, while ZL and ZR let you zoom in and out for a closer look at the environment.

Movement is handled through the left and right analog sticks combined with the A button, or through the touchscreen if you're playing in handheld or tabletop mode; you just tap where you want Aarik to go. On PC, left-clicking moves Aarik while right-clicking rotates the world, making it a surprisingly one-handed-friendly experience overall.

Either way, the controls feel natural fairly quickly, and the opening levels do a good job of easing you in before things start getting more layered. The perspective mechanic alone would be enough to carry a short, breezy puzzle game, but Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom doesn't stop there. As you move through each environment, Aarik collects new gemstones that slot into his father's crown and unlock additional abilities.

These gems are color-coded, and the platforms throughout the environment tend to display which gem color interacts with them, so you're rarely left completely guessing about what a given object responds to. It's a clean visual language that the game establishes early and sticks with throughout.

The red gem lets Aarik move things around telekinetically: fragment platform pieces, objects that need to land on pressure pads, and machine components that need toggling. The purple gem gives him control over cogs and gears, letting him spin mechanisms to reveal hidden areas or switch machines on and off.

With the help of this blue gemstone, Aarik is able to control robots and all other machinery that exists on the planet.

He can place them wherever he wants or use them to keep certain switches pressed. And the final ability introduces time manipulation, letting Aarik reverse decay and rebuild ruined structures, crumbling bridges reconstructing themselves, broken walls rising back into place. Each new power gets a short dedicated tutorial level when it first appears, which works really well.

Rather than dumping a wall of text on you explaining what the gem does, the game just puts you in a controlled situation and lets you figure it out through action. After that brief introduction, it trusts you to carry that knowledge forward. Later levels blend all of these abilities together, asking you to juggle perspective shifts, object placement, gear rotation, and robot control simultaneously to find the path to the exit, a glowing pillar of white light at the end of each stage.

The puzzles in Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom are designed to be approachable rather than punishing. The game is clearly aimed at a casual audience, and the difficulty reflects that throughout. The focus is less on picking the right action from a wide range of options and more on working out the correct order in which to do things.

It is an important distinction that helps keep the puzzles rational and enjoyable, while still stopping shy of crossing into the frustrating realm. There are a few tricky puzzles along the way in the later levels, but these, too, do not demand the sort of lateral thinking that could potentially stump a player.

It is far more engaging than challenging, which certainly makes the game more accessible to anyone who enjoys the cozy/casual side of video games.

Each level is small and self-contained, which keeps the pacing tight and consistent. Some consist of a single puzzle island, while others chain two or three mini-environments together with warp points, letting Aarik move between them. You're never overwhelmed by scale.

Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom spans around thirty levels in total, spread across different biomes: dense forests, rocky ocean outcroppings, dry desert stretches, boggy marshlands, each with its own color palette and visual feel. As you move through them, the sense of ruin is ever-present, though the tone stays hopeful rather than gloomy. 

There's always a suggestion that things can be fixed, that the kingdom can be restored, and that feeling carries through to the end. Visually, Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom is easy on the eyes. The art style is low-poly and cartoonish, with warm, vibrant colors that keep everything lively even as the world around Aarik falls apart.

The color-coding system for interactive objects does a lot of work in communicating what you can and can't engage with at any given moment: red for movable things, blue for controllable beings, and so on. It's intuitive once you've internalized it. That said, this system could present a genuine barrier for players with color vision difficulties, and there's no dedicated accessibility mode to address that gap.

It's a relatively straightforward fix that would open the game up to more players, and it's worth mentioning as a missed opportunity on Shatterproof's part.

From an audio standpoint, the soundtrack is nice and blends into the background without requiring any concentration from you at all, matching the laid-back tone the game is aiming for. The compositions shift subtly between biomes, and while none of it is particularly memorable, it does its job of maintaining a consistent mood. The sound design outside of the music, however, is a more mixed bag.

Every object in the environment produces sound: robots moving around, blocks being slid from one spot to another, clicks and mechanical noises from things that aren't even on screen at the time. Layered together, this can get overstimulating fairly quickly, particularly if you're playing with headphones.

If you have any sensitivity to sound, turning the audio down or playing muted might actually make for a more comfortable experience. It's a shame, because the music itself is worth hearing. There are some bugs and rough edges worth mentioning. On PC, the game has had stability issues, including mid-level crashes, characters not appearing when a level loads, and freezing and requiring a force-close.

Some of this appeared to be tied to progress carried over from a demo version, which may have caused conflicts for players who had already invested time in Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom before the full release. The development team has been responsive in addressing these over time, and the game is in considerably better shape now than it was at first, but it's still something to be aware of depending on your setup.

Even setting stability aside, there are mechanical frustrations worth flagging.

Placing objects precisely is fiddly; if something isn't positioned exactly right, it snaps back to its original location without any clear feedback about what went wrong or how close you were. A small sound cue or a visual highlight when a placement is correct would make a real difference to the experience.

There's also one puzzle involving barrels that requires physically walking Aarik into them to push them out of the way, with no animation or prompt to suggest that's what you're supposed to do. It stands out as inconsistent with the rest of the game's interaction design and can leave you scratching your head longer than the puzzle itself warrants.

The time-manipulation mechanic has some control issues on PC as well. The mouse motion required to activate it is touchy and inconsistent; it often registers nothing for a stretch before suddenly snapping through all the action at once, which makes precise use of the ability feel unreliable.

Hitboxes throughout Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom can also be uneven; Aarik's own character model sometimes gets in the way of placing objects correctly, forcing you to rotate the camera just to clear the path for an interaction you should be able to do directly. Even selecting and directing Aarik or robots is not always seamless and may sometimes end up deselecting your selection rather than directing them the way you wish.

This is one of those issues that do not necessarily make the game unplayable,e but can frustrate the player nonetheless.

Outside of the main puzzles, each level hides a collectible crown somewhere in the environment. Finding them is mostly a matter of rotating the camera until they appear, then clicking to collect. Most are fairly visible once you think to look, though a small handful are tucked away more cleverly.

These feed into an achievement system alongside other milestones, pressing pressure switches a cumulative number of times, rotating gears by a total degree count, making plants grow, running a certain distance, and more. It adds a small but welcome layer of extra engagement for anyone who wants to squeeze more out of the experience beyond just reaching the end.

The whole thing runs somewhere between two and three hours. At the price point Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom is at, that's a fair exchange for what the game delivers. It won't push seasoned puzzle fans particularly hard, and if you're going in expecting a meatier, brain-bending challenge, you'll likely find it too light.

But if what you want is something relaxed and charming to work through at your own pace, something that feels good to play without demanding too much, Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom does that comfortably. The gem system gives the puzzles enough variety to stay interesting across the runtime; the visual design is warm and inviting, and the story, quiet as it is, gives you just enough reason to keep pushing forward.