Into the Emberlands is described as a cosy exploration game with a rogue-lite twist. Here, you take on the role of the light bearer, and it’s your job to find lost ones, rebuild your village, and keep the mysterious miasma that threatens your home town at bay with the ember flame.
The flame burns brightly in the middle of the village, and with some of the flame captured in a lateen, you can safely explore the land outside of the village through the miasma to find lost members of the village and gain the resources needed to rebuild the village back up to how it once was.
Developed by Tiny Roar, a development studio founded in 2015 and based in Hamburg, Germany. Their mission is to craft fun, polished, and easily accessible gaming experiences for all types of players, and they have crafted such games as Bomb Bots Arena for mobile and XEL for the Nintendo Switch and Steam.
And you can see their philosophy in Into the Emberlands, with what looks like easy-to-navigate systems and designs. It’s important to note that this game is in early access on Steam, and although it’s running well, some of these systems and mechanics need some work to get them to a passable standard. Its asking price of £5.49 reflects this, I think, and it’s quite a generous price for what you’re getting here, even with the shortcomings.
As the light bearer, you need to explore outside of the village in order to save lost ones and gather those important resources. To start with, the flame will only let you take thirty steps before the flame runs out, and you will become a lost one yourself. You can top up this total by finding ember flames, which are scattered all around, each one giving you an extra five steps. There are other ways you can go further, including upgrading your lantern, finding ovens to burn wood, which will help fill up your lantern, and finding the lost ones, which give you ten extra steps each.
Upgrading the lantern is done mainly through the large chickens you will find on your travels. I have no idea why they are chickens or what rebalance they have to the game, but that’s what’s here! To gain your upgrade, you need to give the chicken a crystal, which you can obtain by helping trolls that you will also find just staring around and not doing much. To obtain a crystal, they normally want 8 pieces of wood, which you can gather by chopping down trees. The troll will also grace you every time with two coins, which will come in very handy later. You can upgrade your inventory and wallet in this way also, though you can upgrade the lantern and wallet way more times than your inventory, which did leave me juggling items many times as I just did not have room.
This is one area that drastically needs addressing, especially when you get into the later levels, as it was just frustrating trying to organise it. I can’t understand the decision to not let you upgrade the inventory by so little, as I could of done with double the space I had. You can drop items but not tools, and you can only drop one item at a time, which is fine if you only have one, but if you have ten pieces of wood, it gets tiring pretty quickly. There’s also no place to store items. I would have loved the option to have a store house back in the village where I could stash left-over items, but alas, no such thing exists just yet.
The search for resources can get quite heavy as you progress, with some items needing to be turned into other items, which can only be done in certain places. For example, when you need some red lotion, you need five Scarlett flowers and twenty of your ember steps. Other needed items follow similar mechanics, and it can become a headache keeping up with them all. It doesn’t help that most of these systems are not explained to you, leaving it to you to figure them out yourself, which did lead to some frustration. There were some instances where I picked up items I had no clue what to do with or what they were for.
Another annoyance was with the camera. You are only allowed to scope the immediate area around you with the camera, and although that did come in handy, there were many times I wanted to scope the whole map, especially when I was totally lost and needed to find out which direction the village was. This led to me wandering around, trying in vain to find the town before I ran out of flame, which I wasn’t successful in in many of these situations. There is a compass, but that only gives you the direction of lost ones and nothing else; it’s not even that helpful for that either, and it’s something the developers need to look at to improve upon.
This leads me to my biggest gripe, as if you do ‘get lost’ and have to start again, you lose all the upgrades you’ve gathered. I couldn’t believe it when my lantern dropped from 180 back down to 30, with my inventory and wallet following suit. I felt deflated as all the progress I had made had just been taken away from me, and it was especially gutting as some of these upgrades were quest rewards. I feel it’s to much of a punishment and fair enough; let me lose the items and lost ones I’d gathered, but upgrades too? Not cool. When you do return from being lost, you do retain the tasks you have completed, thankfully, and it’s here that the game shows its rogue lite feature, where a new map will be generated to keep the exploration fresh.
I feel like I have been just slating the game, and I want to stress that there is a fun and engaging game here. There were many times I was engrossed in the gameplay, enjoying the exploration and the fine visuals Tiny Roar had created. I appreciated that there is no combat at all in the game, and upgrading the village felt rewarding, seeing it change as it grew. Even the complicated resource hunting was fun up to a certain point.
There’s a lot of work to be done to get this game up to standard, and I guess that’s why it’s in early access. My recommendation would be to give Into the Emberlands some time to address the problems it has, but when that time comes, this should hopefully be a fine game to spend your time with.
*As this game is in early access, no score will be given until the final version of the game has been released, and this review will be updated.
Release Date: Out Now
Platforms: PC Via Steam
Price: £5.49
Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy
Version Tested: Steam via Steam Deck
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