Overview
What is Ariana and the Elder Codex?
Ariana and the Elder Codex is a side-scrolling action RPG developed by HYDE and published by Compile Heart, with international publishing handled by Idea Factory International. The game was first revealed in early 2025 as part of Compile Heart’s lineup and launched in Japan on August 21, 2025, for PS5, PS4, and Nintendo Switch, with a worldwide release following on March 24, 2026, and a PC version scheduled shortly after.
The game follows Ariana, a librarian tasked with restoring the Seven Hero Codices, magical books whose corruption has caused magic to disappear from the world. Using her ability to enter these books, Ariana explores self-contained stages.
Ariana and the Elder Codex features:
⚫︎ Side-scrolling Action RPG
⚫︎ Over 30 Unlockable Magic Spells and Abilities
⚫︎ Repair Point Challenges
⚫︎ Hand-Painted Aesthetics
⚫︎ Elemental Combat Mechanics
⚫︎ Challenging Boss Encounters
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||
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 Steam |
 Switch |
 PlayStation |
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| $29.99 | ||||||
Ariana and the Elder Codex Review: Every Bit as Magical as Its Codices
Books Become Worlds
Back when my Nintendo Wii still turned on, and my PS2 hadn’t yet kicked the bucket, I spent an embarrassing amount of hours glued to the screen playing Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Odin Sphere. Both were developed by Vanillaware, and they were a welcome reprieve from an era that was obsessed with pushing mediocre 3D graphics. They were 2D side-scrollers, but the art was so hand-drawn that it looked better than many games on the market at the time. I remember spending hours just taking in the visuals, even when the gameplay got difficult. They were simple but beautiful experiences that defined that era of gaming for me.
I hadn't thought about those games in a long while until I sat down with Ariana and the Elder Codex. It’s a title from HYDE, which is the same studio responsible for Digimon Survive. Given their track record with my favorite Digimon game (sorry, Digimon Story: Time Stranger), I had high hopes for this one. It may not do anything absurdly new, but it understands the appeal of a side-scroller with great art direction and responsive controls. In that regard, it didn't disappoint.
Magic is Gone, so the Fate of the World is Up to a Librarian
Magic in Ariana and the Elder Codex has effectively ceased. For fifteen centuries, everything was held together by the Seven Hero Codices, which were legendary books that kept the world in balance. But something went wrong. Corruption has taken hold of these books, stripping away their magical essence and leaving the world dry. As the world stalls, the responsibility to fix it all falls on Ariana, a young Librarian, one of the many guardians of the Elder Codices. She, however, has the ancient ability to dive into the physical pages of these books.
She must then jump into each of these seven corrupted volumes and fix the damage from the inside. But as you’d expect from a modern RPG, it’s never that easy; the pages are crawling with monsters spawned by whatever evil force is corrupting the books. On top of that, there’s a mysterious Fairy of Light who keeps popping up, who claims he knows Ariana, though she has no memory of him. All of these somehow tie back to the mystery of why her parents disappeared when she was a kid.
Although the main goal is unwaveringly linear, the world-building around it is dense. The Library is your main hub, and it is packed with bookshelves that hold a lot of lore. You can can lose yourself for quite a while reading up on the history of the world, the origins of the Forbidden Codices, the major events that shaped the last fifteen hundred years. You don’t strictly need to read these records to understand the main plot, but doing so gives you a better understanding of what it is these Librarians are fighting for.
This attention to detail extends to the NPCs scattered around the hub. Even though most of them are faceless, they all have names and brief histories with Ariana. These small interactions do a lot to ground the story.
For instance, a fellow Librarian named Ai will give you equipment as a token of gratitude. She explains that because of your work inside the books, her small home nation is finally starting to show signs of recovery. These kinds of moments are everywhere, and I like how they make your actions feel like they have a tangible impact on the people around you, even if those people are just minor characters in the background.
Most of your playtime, however, will be inside the Seven Codices. Each book contains short stories that Ariana witnesses as she explores its contents. These Codices were originally written to record the deeds of ancient heroes, so they play out like fables. They are relatively simple tales that serve as the meat in the sandwich of each level. In the Codex of Water, you follow a story about two sisters and the sacrifices they make for each other. In the Codex of Wind, the theme is focused on the idea of freedom.
They aren't the deepest stories you’ll ever encounter, and at first, they feel a bit disconnected from Ariana’s own journey, but they eventually circle back to the main plot in ways I found quite satisfying.
However, if you’ve played these types of games before, you’ll find that the plot is fairly predictable. You can usually see the big twists and plot beats coming from a mile away. This predictability is made more obvious by the game’s pacing.
Because you spend the vast majority of your time exploring the mini-worlds inside the books, the overarching story can start to feel a bit thin. There are long stretches where the main plot doesn't move forward at all, which makes the story and the gameplay feel like they are running on two separate tracks rather than working together.
Non-Linear, This is Not
Despite the predictable nature of the plot, the actual act of playing Ariana and the Elder Codex is quite fun. It is a 2D action-platformer that tasks you with traversing the worlds hidden inside the Seven Hero Codices. So, your main objective in every area is to locate Repair Points, which essentially function as tears in the book’s narrative that you have to patch up by fighting a bunch of enemies inside an arena or racing against a clock to get from point A to point B.
You aren’t forced to complete every single one you find, as the story only requires a specific set to progress. However, gaining access to them isn't always a matter of just walking up to the tear. Sometimes, a Repair Point is locked until you hunt down a specific minion hiding in a far corner of the map, and other times, you’ll find yourself staring at blocks of rocks you simply can’t open yet.
Don’t be misled, though. This is not a Metroidvania. Although there is plenty of backtracking, it is more akin to Odin Sphere than Silksong. You have your central hub in the Library, and from there, you select which volume to enter in (early on) specific sequences.
The levels themselves are quite linear. Even when the path branches, it usually leads to a dead end with a collectible before forcing you back onto the main track. You will often finish a Codex with only 80% or 85% completion because you lack a specific ability—like a ground pound or a double jump—required to open a new path. You’re expected to head back to the hub, progress elsewhere, and return later with the right tools to achieve full completion.
Combat is Fast and Fun
The depth of the game really lies in how you build Ariana’s loadout. As a Librarian, you eventually gain access to over thirty unlockable spells and skills. You can have six of these equipped at any given time, split into two sets of three that you can swap between instantly by holding down a shoulder button.
These spells aren’t infinite, though. They operate on cooldowns, which prevents you from just spamming your most powerful moves to win every fight. You have to be intentional about when you fire a water beam or a protective shield, especially since your basic sword swings only do so much on their own.
Most of these skills are tied to elemental affinities—water, wind, earth, and fire—matching the themes of the books you visit. This leads to a mechanic that becomes essential in the later stages of the game. If you hit an enemy with enough elemental attacks, they eventually trigger an elemental explosion. This stuns the target and deals massive damage to enemies in the area of explosion.
To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sold on the combat during the first few hours. The air combos were fluid, and the attacks were punchy enough, but, at least in the beginning, it felt like I could just mash my way through most encounters.
That changed when I hit the boss fight inside of the Wind Codex. I got absolutely pulverized. I realized then that I couldn’t just brute-force my way through the game; the bosses in this game are relentless, and they require you to experiment with your loadout and "git gud" with your dodge timings.
I started trying out different builds to see what felt natural. I tried out different combinations, like using a spell that automatically fires water projectiles at enemies while I focused on dodging, or imbuing my sword strikes with the wind element so that every swing sent out a sonic wave. I even tried making it so my dashes leave behind a trail of damaging wind attacks and generating shields that soak up both physical and magical hits. By the end of my playthrough, I had tried almost every skill in the game just to see how they interacted with one another. It took a lot of trial and error to get synergies right, but there was nothing quite like the rush of finally landing that winning blow.
One thing you should be prepared for, however, is that the game can be a bit cheap with its damage scaling. There are moments where a boss will damage you with a multi-hit attack, and because there are almost no invincibility frames after you get hit, your health can drop from 100% to 10% in a single second.
It can be frustrating to lose a long boss fight because of one mistake. My best advice for anyone starting is to find and equip the passive spell that automatically triggers a heal when your HP hits a certain threshold. Without that, some of the later bosses will be infuriating, especially on higher difficulty.
Amazing Art Direction, but Little Enemy Variety
Doing those relentless boss fights is made much easier by how well the game actually runs. I played the Switch version of Ariana and the Elder Codex on the Switch 2, and for the most part, the performance was impressively fluid. Even when the screen was absolutely littered with elemental explosions and dozens of enemies, the framerate stayed stable. There were only a few isolated instance where the frame rate dropped for a negligible amount of time, usually when too many particle effects triggered at the same time, but these cases were few and far between.
The 2D hand-drawn backgrounds are detailed and give each Codex a distinct atmosphere that matches its elemental theme. What’s particularly impressed me is how the 3D character models interact with these 2D environments. Often in these types of games, 3D assets can look like they don't belong because they lack the texture of the world around them. They often appear too smooth or perfect against the imperfect lines of a painted backdrop. Here, the lighting and the heavy use of thick and stylized outlines help the models match the aesthetic of the backgrounds.
There is, however, a noticeable lack of variety when it comes to standard enemies. You will frequently encounter the same handful of models throughout your entire journey. The game tries to differentiate them by changing their color hues to match their elemental type, or by making them slightly larger with glowing red eyes to signal that they are elite versions, but the actual designs don’t change much.
The most creative and interesting designs are definitely reserved for the bosses, but since regular enemies respawn every time you leave and re-enter an area, you’ll be fighting these same few recolored grunts quite a lot. It’s a minor gripe in an otherwise beautiful game, but it’s something you’ll definitely notice by the time you reach the first few Codices.
Is Ariana and the Elder Codex Worth It?
Yes, Every Page is Worth Exploring
Ariana and the Elder Codex costs only $30. It is certainly not the biggest release coming out this March, and it probably won’t be the most talked-about game in April either, but it feels like a project made with a genuine amount of love and care. My first playthrough of the main story took me almost 18 hours, which is a solid length for a 2D action title. If you are a completionist, you can maybe even squeeze more time out of it.
Of course, it remains a niche title, which means there are inevitably some compromises. The predictable plot and the lack of variety in enemy models are reminders that this isn't a massive AAA production with an infinite budget. However, these flaws didn't stop me from diving into the Codices and mastering different sets of elemental spells.
It does its job of presenting a beautifully hand-drawn world with tight combat mechanics well for what it wants to be. Not every game needs to change the world to be worth your time, after all.
Ariana and the Elder Codex FAQ
What is Ariana and the Elder Codex Release Date?
Ariana and the Elder Codex is scheduled to release internationally for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch on March 24, 2026. The PC version is set to follow a month later, on April 29, 2026. The game did, however, launch in Japan months prior, on August 21, 2025.
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