Game: Ankora: Lost Days
Genre: Adventure
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam, Windows)
Developers | Publishers: CHIBIG
Age Rating: US E10+ | EU 7+
Price: US $19.99 | UK £17.99 | EU € 19,99
Release Date: September 15th, 2022
Review code used, with many thanks to CHIBIG.
Ankora: Lost days is the new adventure game from Chibig. You might remember their previous games, Summer in Mara and Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition. We reviewed Summer in Mara and Deiland and wrote guides for both games.
Like the previous games, Ankora: Lost Days was funded during a Kickstarter campaign. It’s also part of the Chibig universe, although it is an independent and unique adventure with its own story. Ankora is set some years before Deiland and Summer in Mara. Anyone who has played Chibig’s previous games will be familiar with the lead character, Mûn, who you control in Ankora.
Lost Days
In Ankora: Lost Days, Mûn is a Space Ranger Cadet who decides to go off exploring independently. Unfortunately for Mûn, her spaceship crash lands on a strange and mysterious planet. Ankora is set up as small blocks that make up the map. Some have different environmental biomes, from forests, deserts and mountains, to name a few. It is sparsely populated, but Mûn meets some locals hanging around on some of the little islands.
The Ank’s are little furry creatures divided into hierarchies with a Chief, Sages and clans, and are involved in agriculture, hunting and trade. They live on Ankora but are troubled as the Anks believe an old enemy wants to unleash war again between their clans.
Find the Missing Spaceship Parts
Mûn sets out to explore the planet and find the missing parts of her spaceship that are spread far and wide when it crash-landed on the planet.
Mûn can craft on the go as you can build a workbench anywhere as long as you have the resources. She can also make a campfire and cook food in a pot to ensure she doesn’t go hungry.
The planet of Ankora isn’t flat, as each little area on the map is all at different levels in height. So Mûn must learn to overcome obstacles, get past waterfalls, cross rivers, and deal with rocks that block her from moving around the planet.
She has the right tools for the task, as she is armed with a saw, pickaxe, spear and an essential shovel. Mûn also has a tent to sleep in to regenerate her health bar which can be pitched anywhere on a biome, so she can rest.
Terraforming
Terraforming is the most significant change between Ankora: Lost Days and the previous games that Chibig has developed. To move across the blocky island, you must use a shovel to remove or add soil to the square Mûn is standing on, as the terrain is uneven and Mûn can’t jump.
Doing so raises or lowers the earth that Mûn is standing on. You must first equip the shovel and then pick the option to dig up or down via the controls. Unfortunately, the control layout for the game on the Switch feels anything but intuitive when terraforming, it is fiddly to implement.
Make Stairs and Bridges
Mûn can build stairs to help her traverse the terrain; the stairs are made of wood, but there are plenty of trees to cut for wood.
She can also make wooden bridges to help to move across water, but only if you have the right items in the inventory. It takes wood and an object dropped from a monster to make a rope to add to wood to make the stairs. Or you can find an Ank trader and trade resources you have gathered for rope.
A Few Niggles
I was looking forward to playing Ankora: Lost Days. While the game is satisfactory in some aspects, such as the storyline and the quick crafting, there’s a letdown as well.
The terraforming gets repetitive quickly. In addition, I spent the first four hours of the game hitting a roadblock, trying to move around the map. It is completely blank when you start playing; areas only appear on the map after discovering it.
When you are on each square area on the map, the place you are might only have an exit that leads south or west when you want to go to the east. You are also up against it as Mûn can not move across the corners of the block she is standing on, so you can find yourself unable to reach an exit to move on. You can teleport to certain areas and then trudge back to where you were initially on the map. The game felt more like a puzzle game to me than an adventure game for that reason.
Bright and Colourful
As for the planet, Ankora, it is bright and colourful with plenty of trees and stones to remove. There are a few aminals running around and the sounds of nature. Combat in the game is easy; Mûn has to kill for item drops. But finding monsters to kill, especially when you are looking for a particular item drop for crafting, is difficult as the planet is so sparsely populated.
In addition, you will only find about eight Ank’s spread around the map to trade with. The map felt empty and void of life and other characters to meet. I moved from one biome to another without finding much other than trees and stone.
Conclusion
Ankora: Lost Days is a bit of a peculiar game. After playing it I think it might be a little confused in its identity. It is not an open adventure game where you have the freedom to explore fully like in Summer in Mara. Moving around the map and terraforming it makes it a kind of puzzle as you figure out how to get from east to west. Some aspects of the game stand out, the music is lovely and the animations are done well, but I much prefer Summer in Mara and so might you!
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure 