AETHER & IRON

This tactics RPG could be the next great noir videogame

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People mill about laughing in the sun, but something's off. The world feels grainy and sluggish, like I'm wading through sand. I need to keep the girl close. Aether & Iron is so dripping with noir it's leaving behind fedora-shaped puddles. It's full of steely internal dialogue like this where you hear the main character, Gia Randazzo, take in her surroundings.

Gia has good reason to have her guard up: her world is a fantastical, fractured, floating New York City in the 1930s with the gangsters and violence synonymous with noir, but these goons have flying cars and lasers to conduct their bad business. Adding to the noir setup, we meet Gia “at a low point in her career [when] her reputation has dried up, her money has disappeared, and she's left with few options to turn her life around,” Tyler Whitney, narrative lead on the project, tells me.