When initially seeing Ageless, it’s hard not to immediately think of Celeste. Celeste made quite the impression on the Indie platforming genre just a few years ago, with distinct use of a simple pixel art style combined with an often brutal difficulty. When you look beyond the pixelated exterior you’ll find Ageless is its own beast. So is it worth the time checking out?

Ageless is a platformer with puzzle elements centered around a young adult named Kiara.  Kiara feels aimless and lacks purpose so she seeks a mysterious shrine; the Gate of Gifts that grants each person a magical ‘gift’. As a result Kiara gains the ability to fire a bow and arrow that can manipulate time.  Use this new skill to overcome the obstacles that keep Kiara from moving forward. It only works on plants and animals, and gives the ability to decrease or increase their age. The earliest example would be the Rhino-like creature, it can take form as an egg or baby. Then when it ages it can be a large rampaging Rhino that charges through barriers. Age it once more for an older heavy Rhino that falls through ground barriers. Sometimes the solution is obvious by what you need the animal or plant to do, sometimes you have to get creative. If you’re thinking abstract enough you can accidentally break some puzzles, getting through with ingenious use of the mechanics. You’ll also want to keep an eye out for alternative paths, leading to secret relics to collect. Often tucked away in even more difficult rooms, it’s not just collecting the relic, but surviving the trip back to the nearest checkpoint to keep it. 

The other ability you have is being able to activate an Ageless mode. This allows you to see hidden relics and freeze time. You can also drain time from animals and plants to dash over a larger distance. Ultimately it just allows you to dash when the game wants you to. It can also be used to fling the animals around while you dash off of them, they can be moved in the opposite direction. Most of the time the dashing works fine, only in some situations the item you’re going to boost from doesn’t register and lead to some fiddly workarounds. Thankfully those moments are limited and not the norm.  

The bow doesn’t feel great to control. I found it fiddly when trying to hit a small target, or when two are close together. It just never felt great to aim in general. The most trying parts are when you need to fire arrows under duress, like boss encounters or puzzles that have a few moving parts. There are also situations where one hit with an arrow isn’t enough to age/deage something, it takes multiple and it just doesn’t need to be that way, not when the bow already isn’t fun to use. Movement is also hit or miss, mostly when it comes to jumping and wall jumping. When it looked like an alternative path involved putting your faith in the jumping/wall jumping mechanics, I often missed it. Life’s too short for this! While the bow and the movement have their issues, they’re not enough to make the game unplayable.

Celeste was a difficult game, so it’s not surprising that Ageless is also. Celeste paced it well and even offered settings to make it so you don’t need to be an expert platformer to enjoy it. Ageless doesn’t do this. It throws difficulty spikes so severe that it makes it difficult to stick with the game once you hit the first boss. That encounter was savage enough to leave a sour taste, dreading any bosses to come. It wasn’t helped that the generous checkpoints throughout the rest of the game are much more spaced out in the boss fights. 

While it shares similarities with the pixel art and platforming, it also shares a familiar theme from Celestes story; depression. Kiara’s aimlessness and her depression come up throughout. it’s relatable and it handles it in its own way. Ageless tells its own story, sometimes in shorter moments, in others the game takes a sudden stop from puzzles to inject some emotions into the story. There’s a story beat early on in particular that wants to be serious and sad, and I can feel what it’s going for. It's blunt with the themes and how it relates to Kiara. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just might not have the impact they were going for.

Ageless has its flaws, and while it does share some similarities with another game in the same genre, Ageless does plenty to stand out on its own. The aging/deaging mechanic makes for some interesting puzzles solving and is a neat concept to base a game around. I only wish there was a better way to use those powers than the bow. If you’re prepared to face some steep difficulty spikes, clumsy jumping, and want a decent platformer/puzzler, Ageless is still an adventure worth exploring.