From indie game studio, Tiny Roar, comes the cozy exploration adventure game with roguelike characteristics, Into the Emberlands. Published by Daedalic Entertainment, Into the Emberlands is available on Steam in its Early Access stage.

Into the Emberlands is set in a world threatened by a darkness known as the Miasma. Playing as a Lightbearer equipped with an Ember Lantern, you are tasked with venturing out into the mysterious gloom to collect resources necessary to expand your village populated by the Knacks and bring lost Knacks back home to safety.

The single-mode game has a quest-driven storyline to expand your village by traversing into the different biomes of the Emberlands and collecting various resources that may be required to repair buildings and upgrade your gear and tools. Each time you complete all your quests in the quest log, you can upgrade the Ember Candle in the centre of your village to expand your town, start a new day, and receive new quests.

You are equipped with a backpack and crystal pouch to store resources, a coin belt to hold the local currency, and your Ember Lantern which stores Ember that allows you to traverse the procedurally generated Miasma. Each ‘square’ of the starting biomes of the map uses one ember but squares in biomes farther out from your villages use more, requiring new tools to allow you to explore safely. If you run out of ember in the Miasma, you become ‘lost’ and spawn as a new Lightbearer in your village.

You don’t lose village progress, but you lose all your gear upgrades. You can refill your lantern by returning to the village, completing resource requests from encounters or you can burn wood at furnaces throughout the Miasma. Some pickups like saving a lost Knack, the Ember Bloom flowers, and the Glimmers also grant ember.

Throughout the Miasma are random encounters and creatures that grant you extra loot, Ember, or upgrade your gear in exchange for resources. Each biome has different encounters and resources to collect to complete your quests.

The game is still a little buggy, but this is expected in Early Access. Sometimes, there’s a delay when you’re harvesting for the resource to drop. For example, cutting down some trees will delay dropping wood but the usage count on your tool will still be used. Sometimes you don’t realise and think you’ve mis-clicked, wasting the tool by trying to chop the same block twice.

The quest journal also runs off the screen without the option to be able to scroll through it, so sometimes you’re not always sure what exactly you need to collect if you have a lot of quests. Completed quests also don’t disappear from the quest log, so you need to speak to the Knack who gave you the quest or check the building awaiting repair. It would also be helpful to click the quest in your journal and have it show you the direction of the quests Knack or building because I found myself aimlessly clicking things trying to hand in quests to the correct ones.

Some sprites and resources also completely disappear if you drop them from your backpack. This happened the most with Ember Bloom flowers, which was especially annoying if I was in a pinch and running out of ember. The sprite would disappear, but it wouldn’t grant me the ember back into my lantern, or the wood and rocks would just disappear completely. Some resources don’t have sprites at all, like the arts and crafts pack, so they take up space in your backpack without you knowing, or you drop it and can never find it again.

The graphics have a cozy feel, with vibrant colours and good animations. Each biome is very different in its colour palette making them easy to distinguish from each other. The graphics coupled with the mysterious music create a relaxing ambience with the added edge of a “what happens next?” vibe. The little gibberish language of the Knacks, the wind rustling the trees and flower bushes, the crackling fire from the furnaces, and the random clucks of upgrade chickens are unique but very enjoyable.

Into the Emberlands is a great game in its Early Access state, with the core features established and a roadmap of new features in the works. Although a little buggy, it’s a relaxing, enjoyable cozy treat from Tiny Roar that helps bring down the blood pressure after playing something a little more action-packed. I loved playing this, and I’m excited to delve into the game more and check out the new features as they’re released. I’d recommend this game to any fellow fans of the cozy game genre.

Written by: Emily France