Sands of Aura on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Sands of Aura is an open-world action adventure with a fantasy setting of a realm in its twilight--a world buried beneath a sea of sand. Sail across the sandseas to return life to a dying world in an unforgettable experience that is equal parts engaging story and unrelenting, souls-like combat.
Sands of Aura is a action rpg, souls-like and dungeon crawler game
developed by Chashu Entertainment
and published by indie.io.
Released on October 27th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 755 reviews of which 574 were positive and 181 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.3 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 22.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 0.51€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified Sands of Aura into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64 bit)
- Processor: Intel i5-4440 / AMD FX-8370
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 960 / AMD R9 285
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 22 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 11 sound device
- Additional Notes: These requirements may change during early access period.
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Most games sailing in the wake of what we know as SoulsLikes deal with the same melancholy, lost civilizations and cyclical themes with diminishing returns as their genre-defining predecessors and contemporaries. It’s ironic that so many end up as barely remembered relics themselves so quickly, never leaving the same footprint as their incandescent inspirations. Can this one, with its lone and not so level sands stretching far away fare any better? Let’s break it down… Visuals&UI If you’ve played any (Action)RPG, Soulslike or even Metroidvania, you’ll be fine. One thing I was missing was actual exact info for status-effects, since most of them might as well have displayed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The icons fit nicely, but in general had the vibes of someone dressed for the wrong kind of party, coming across as minimalistic compared to the rest of the visuals. Sands of Aura, in a depressing way, is a very beautiful game. It harbors the same unsettling beauty as a ghost town, a perfectly silent, lonely night in late autumn, or a bunch of crows tearing a trashbag apart in a backalley. Weirdly angled ruins, crystals and weathered rocks pierce the ever shifting and grinding sea of sand around the last safe haven in that world. It clads itself in Tim Burton-esque animated film style, with an eerie stylized stop motion toy aesthetic that adds uncanny suspense to ruins, caves and tombs and comforting whimsy to blooming flower fields, shanty towns or bodies of clear water. Effects for spells, special attacks and weather are all cool and thematic. They rarely clutter a screen and are a welcome burst of color in an otherwise pretty muted world. The ambience caters to a world of sand, stone and metal. You will travel the sands which absolutely win in atmosphere, but you spend a lot of time looking at sky, sand and stone. Visually, we have a game that is dark, brown and grey in many places. If you just take in scenery from your ship called a ‘Grainwake’ that’s all fine and dandy, but, if you, let’s say, look for a character dressed in dark cloth and weathered armor in a dark weathered place, or for any other level colored object among level colored object things get exhausting. Characters feature the same style and your mileage may vary. Creation choices are limited and not very exciting and due to the top-down slightly tilted camera perspective you won’t see much of your character’s body silhouette for most of the game anyway. You get covered in cool armor soon enough, and any set is potentially viable until endgame, so fashion-souls your little heart out. Sets offer a nice variety and are composed well, with an impressive density of clutter and dangly stuff attached. They still have to be slapped on your androgynous mannequin-esque body, so again, mileage may vary. Weapons, objects and monsters are, by contrast, much more creative and interesting. Anything animated is snappy and has good readability. Granted, I play a lot of these games, so maybe I’m just more forgiving. Monster animations, especially for the weirder ones, have visceral weight to them. Your own movement sometimes lacks a lot of that - and yes, sorry, I’m one of those people who really think the dodge roll should be retired and replaced with sidesteps or dashes, it’s just goofy at this point, especially if you cannonball across half the screen, like you do here. The perspective is top down with a slight tilt. It adds to the atmosphere of most places, since, as with dark places you visit with a lantern, the area you actively have visual control over is limited. This is double edged to a point where I say it’s one of the most frustrating visual features I have ever encountered. If it wasn’t in true Souls fashion constantly your worst enemy that would be fine. Geometry often obstructs your line of sight, so that you feel like you cannot control what you want to see. What makes it so frustrating to me is that this was a deliberate choice, despite the fact technical implementation suffers from a bunch of problems. Sound Soundtrack is fine and fits the theme. Shame that the band you collect don’t have more custom songs, but the ‘finished’ song was fantastic. Weapon swings lack punch and weight, but Specials deliver. What the game nails are sound cues like the cracking of your shield, for example. The standout here is the voice acting which has a lot of heart and good direction and helps the characters being much more vivid. Special shoutout to Felker, whose VA must’ve gargled gravel and sand for reals. It’s a shame your own character isn’t voiced - I don’t think having yourself be a blank slate silent protagonist was necessary here. Story We’re not treading new ground here. The world is fucked by some ancient goof-up and people have to live in isolated communities, barely surviving, their former cities, glory and empires lie in ruin, swallowed by the callous sands and time and the stereotypical dark force, in this case the Corruption. You are an aspiring Remnant Knight, a traveling warden able to withstand Corruption and fight it to protect your home and friends. You and your mentor discover something’s awry, you investigate, yadda yadda… I’m not saying exploring the world is not cool and interesting, but what elevates Sands of Aura is its zoomed in story and theme about hope and community and the very relatable and deeply weird characters you meet throughout your journey. For a better connection to them, I wish your character was… well, a character. I don’t see a reason for their lack of personality and not having more fleshed out dialogues for them, since your disposition is pretty linear anyway. A sort of heads up: it also does the thing these games love to do and some quests are convoluted and deliberately obtuse. It’s not as bad as FromSoft, but you need brains, unquenchable thirst for exploration, or the internet to catch everything and I’d say it is worth it. Gameplay It’s a top down souls like. Combat punishes greed, exploration rewards the bold,enemies respawn on death or rest, you have Bells for Estus Flasks, and everything is very, very deadly. The adaptation is overall successful, but sometimes, the cracks show, especially when the camera acts up, you get sniped from offscreen, or when you fight more than one enemy at a time that’s not a basic zombie. The ebb and flow of combat is nice - hits fill up your corruption meter, which you can use to execute a special attack, which in turn is converted to magic channelled into 3 flavors of spells, basically offense, utility and defense. Weapons are very diverse and modular and it's fun to tinker with the different pommels, blades, runes for and types of Armor etc to create your personal build. You also have a lantern that sheds light when raised and creates a protective dome with its own regenerative HP pool. You can use it to tank hits or parry. I liked the flavor and utility a lot, especially when upgraded. Sands basically copies Talismans from Hollow Knight and I’m always happy to see that system pop up. Build variety has a crazy amount of moving parts and it’s a lot of fun to mix and match. Exploration is satisfying, traveling with your ship and discovering new places and ports and generally sailing a sandship is such a neat idea. It would be nice if there was more to do, or if the thing was customizable, but that’s the constraints of indie games for you. It’s fair to mention that a few areas of the game are unpolished, some clearly unfinished content, but I’ve encountered no bugs or softlocks. In Conclusion Tragically, Sands of Aura is one of those games that have genuine heart and a solid core, but in my whole life, it’s unlikely I’ll ever casually talk about it and exchange opinions on story, or characters, its highs and lows or even gameplay features, simply because not enough people know about it. Still, loved it to bits, and gladly sailed those sands. Hard recommendation.
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Loving the game so far (25 hr) seems like far off from the end story wise. I have been enjoying the difficulty (you can get way overpowered for an area) and exploration. Right off I was having trouble with some monsters and had to come back to the area later. Enjoying the little bits of world and character stories as you explore. I have a tendency to wander off the main story line if I see something in the distance to explore. The maps are creative and the combat is pretty good. Biggest annoyance I have are some camera issues where the ceiling area does not completely fade out when you are under or close to something. At one point it interfered some with a bit of platforming/jumping (non critical) to get an chest. Couple area's where to get a chest (non critical) there is some platform jumping to do. Not the games strong suit and I find these a bit difficult myself to do. Overall a very good game in my opinion. Will update when I beat it.
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If this game had a minimap, I would play the shit out of it. Its gorgeous. The controls are great. I basically like everything about it - but I am horribly directionally challenged and I cannot play a game that doesn't have a map. Unfortunate.
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Starting to think I just don't understand what gamers want anymore. This game is pretty amazing. The scope, world-building, level design and character customization are wild given a team so small that half of the minute long credits was special thanks and pets. It isn't without it's flaws, but I feel like people refuse to even consider that anything less than a 9/10 game is worth playing and could give you an immensely enjoyable time. Sands of Aura takes place in a huge open ocean of sand, dotted by the last survivors of humanity on isolated islands here and there. Something bad happened long ago to cause this, but you're just a fresh new Remnant Knight tasked with keeping the peace and such. Obviously this leads to world important events and much more. The story itself is decent, probably nothing people haven't seen before but it really sells itself on the world and the history of it which gives all the story beats weight because of how fleshed out and realized the world is. Honestly it's pretty fascinating stuff. You'll see enormous remnants of old that you literally get no explanation for and you'll wonder what in the actual heck the world was like before. I know I loved seeing these random places pop up. Combat is what most would consider a 3rd person high camera Soulslike, and I won't dismiss that comparison at all, as it has a couple trappings of the genre. But it also does it's own thing a lot of the time. There are no levels or anything, everything is based around your equipment. And every piece of equipment is customizable. Weapons have fighting styles, blade effects, pommel effects and codex effects which all can be discovered, interchanged and made up over the course of the game giving you a ton of variety in how you approach combat. I used a quick, stabbing build that dealt damage over time effects for 1v1 and bosses and a large sweeping polearm for exploring against multiple enemies that automatically cast spells. Armor comes in sets with effects for each 2 pieces you equip which are similarly widely varied and can completely change how you play. There is a ton of replayability due to the amount of options you have in how you want to approach the game. This is ignoring the spellblade abilities which can be activated for attacks, dodges and blocks separately with assigned elements that also do different things. The level design is extremely varied with a lot of exploration for many of the islands. Due to the limited size of the team, there aren't dozens of huge islands to explore but the ones that are there are hand-crafted and full of hidden paths, shortcuts, secrets and strikingly different visual designs. Personally, while some may balk at the character designs or think it's not a very good looking game, I quite enjoyed the style and refuse to hear anything negative about how gorgeously crafted the world is. Aesthetics are worlds more important than graphics. You move between islands in a sandship that reminded me a ton of Windwaker. There is an okay amount to find, but honestly the soothing surfing around while investigating far away things that catch your eye or realizing just how vast the distances are really added to the world to me. Did the giant wall that flanked the entire left side of the map have a gameplay effect or associated dungeon? No, but it sure was impressive to see and made you wonder about the world before. As said above, it's not without it's flaws. Combat can be a bit frustrating with unsure hitboxes, level layout not having clear indicators of what is a fall to a landable area and what will just kill you, long spaces between save points, etc. But I really did not care about most of it to the extent that it impacted my enjoyment. It's very obvious while playing that the devs had more planned but I guess sales weren't good enough to keep making content. Which is a real shame, because there are some areas I would've LOVED to explore or see expanded, storylines that do not have definitive endings I wanted to continue as well as seeing what islands would pop up in the underpopulated areas of the map. I thought this game was a blast. Enjoyed it beginning to end and am playing through the Hard Mode to try new builds and make choices to see how the story plays out differently. Can't recommend this game enough, quite a hidden gem.
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A recommendation but only just! This game wants to be Dark Souls I think, or recapture that magic, and it fails. It is not as well written, not as mysterious, and is sharply derivative in many places. It does not reward enough to offset its punishments. Combat is floatey and lacks punch. It relies on a lot gimmick bosses (particularly at the end) that have a schtick or two which one shots you till you figure it out. There simply aren't enough resources (without grinding anyway, and I hate undue grind) to fully build even one full suit of armour and weapon, let alone experiment or change tactics if you are stuck. There are quite a few instances of unfinished and cut content. It is quite hard to find your way around or even find what you want to look for (no minimap and the view is not zoomed out enough to properly navigate the labyrinthine environments). Shortcuts are not frequent enough or clearly signposted when you do find them. There are often not enough checkpoints which means to get back to where you died you either slowly chop your way back, or just run past everything - and if I can run past it why am I even bothering to do this properly? There is no PAUSE! I hate that. What happens if Real Life intervenes? You get splattered in game or annoy someone because you cannot stop to deal with it! I get that souls-likes often ditch pause but it is a terrible design. In many ways I finished it because I have trouble giving up on something. By the end a lot of the initial pleasure was simply gone. But... Nice art design (kind of Tim Burtonesque in places), big open world, good atmosphere, decent exploration, good music, and ok gameplay when it isn't being sadistic or clumsy... Despite my anger at a bunch of weaknesses and a general feeling of relief that is over now and I can go play something better, it is still fun, mostly, at least for two thirds of the game.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Sands of Aura is currently priced at 22.99€ on Steam.
Sands of Aura is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 22.99€ on Steam.
Sands of Aura received 574 positive votes out of a total of 755 achieving a rating of 7.25.
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Sands of Aura was developed by Chashu Entertainment and published by indie.io.
Sands of Aura is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Sands of Aura is not playable on MacOS.
Sands of Aura is not playable on Linux.
Sands of Aura is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for Sands of Aura. Explore additional content available for Sands of Aura on Steam.
Sands of Aura does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Sands of Aura does not support Steam Remote Play.
Sands of Aura is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Sands of Aura.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 10 June 2025 14:25 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 09 June 2025 21:59 |
| Steam price | 14 June 2025 20:26 |
| Steam reviews | 14 June 2025 19:53 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Sands of Aura, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Sands of Aura
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Sands of Aura concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Sands of Aura compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
4
Developer
Chashu Entertainment
Publisher
indie.io
Release
27 Oct 2023
Platforms
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