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Paul Weller (no not that one) is essentially the one man band behind Sunteam, the "studio" responsible for Aeon. With games for other platforms including Windows and the PC Engine under his belt, he only has one other ZX Spectrum game to date, underwater treasure hunting explore 'em up, called That Sinking Feeling. For Aeon however, Paul decides to take things to the polar opposite and head into space for a story spanning across four generations of the Goldenstark family with varying gameplay mechanics.

Firstly, let's start by saying this game is presented to you across nine, yes NINE tapes. Yikes. Specifically four game tapes alternate between the five story tapes. They can be played in any order but it makes sense to play them as intended. The story begins with space explorer Jesper Goldenstark finding a new planet that doesn't show on his chart but is giving off energy readings. Naturally our man goes to investigate this energy which turns out to be a special type of crystal. A settlement is established on the planet by a big corporation who plan to monetise the findings. The story continues with Jesper's son Jorda, his daughter Jestra, and finally her son Spencer. We're treated to four generations of one family's life living in the colony and each story tape sets up the premise for your objectives in the game.

I won't dwell too much on the story tapes but the artwork looks great and gives you a sense of what this colony could actually be like. After Jesper lands on the soon-to-be-named Aeon, he's tasked with investigating the energy readings. To get there he needs to traverse the alien landscape in what actually feels like a very heavy spacesuit. You're made less than welcome by the jumping jellyfish and floating headless BB-8 clones. This level is all about avoiding the creatures and jumping across deadly acid pits. Some of the gaps look far too wide but you are able to stand on the very last pixel before making your move.

Tape 4 introduces us to Jorda, whose job is to locate potential mining spots to harvest the crystal energy. Piloting his Roomba impersonator, the Traccle, is the only way to navigate the maze of pipes and avoid the relentless dust storms. This level is a top down maze and the landscape is nicely drawn with all the pipes and cliffs from the story art. Everything moves really fluidly and with a decent speed which gives you better chance to avoid the fast moving storms.

Jesper's granddaughter Jestra is up next and she needs to plug satellite dishes into the side of several buildings whilst piloting her hoverpod which must be running on a 16k modem as it's soooo slow. This makes life pretty difficult as robots working in the building are throwing trash out of the windows. Although you have the sense of traversing the side of a building, this works much the same as the previous level but less 'mazey'.

Lastly Jesper's great grandson Spencer has his work cut out for him as he navigates derelict buildings full of malfunctioning robots. Typical platforming fare here, having to make precarious jumps and make use of gravity chutes to climb higher, all the while avoiding those out of control robots. Spencer's not wearing a spacesuit so feels lighter than his great grandad and thus somewhat more nimble.

There is a little colour clash here and there but nothing that couldn't be passed off as intentional. For instance, the gravity chutes in level 4 make Spencer go yellow but that could just as easily be an energy field or the intense g-force made him wet himself. Every creature you collide with in the whole game will cause an instant death so it's essential to avoid them all. There are 1-ups available but they only appear in the platform stages. The controls don't extend past up, down, left and right movement so the options of QAOP or Kempston joystick are intuitive enough for everything you undertake.

All of the levels have their own unique theme and as such the music has been composed to fit each of them. I feel Sergey has done a great job of it too. The Traccle level starts with the sounds of a massive storm brewing and in the last level it really does feel like the robots have taken over and you need to get a move on. Overall the game has a very fitting soundtrack.

These days I like to be sucked into an engrossing story so for this game to have an actual story behind it is a nice touch. Although it's quite vague I got totally lost in the story to the point where my imagination was filling in the bits we aren't told about. One of Paul's specialties is creating pixel artwork and what he has created for the story tapes looks great.

The limited colour palette doesn't detract from how nice those scenes are. A lot of games would find one mechanic and stick to it, which is of course down to very small amounts of space for the code, but spanning four tapes gives you more leeway with your content. As such we get to play two different styles of game with slight variations to each which helps to keep things interesting.

Unless your name is Hiro Nakamura it's recommended to have the tape speed set as low as possible to enable you to read the story tapes. A button press to advance the scenes at your leisure would be preferable. The 16k Hover Pod level was ok but felt less exciting so is the weakest level in my opinion.

Aeon is a relatively simple game to get to grips with and it's not going to have you throwing your keyboard out of the window any time soon. At best, it has a moderate difficulty so would make a great game for younger gamers to play without the frustration of it being unfairly difficult. The visuals are easy on the eye and everything on screen can be seen with ease with very minimal colour clash. If the story was fleshed out and the number of levels increased this would have the potential to be a really epic game. Naturally the Speccy would probably not be the best place for it but something with more grunt than a women's tennis final would allow for something truly spectacular. As nice as that would be this is still worth a play just to see the potential of the story if nothing else.