Into the Emberlands

Into the Emberlands is a cozy exploration game built around a roguelite core mechanic. As the Lightbearer, you are tasked to venture out into the wilds to collect various resources. These will be used to rebuild your town – the last remaining settlement in a world devoured by an unknown darkness called Miasma.

The look and feel and the gameplay to some extent are very similar to a classic time management game (think of “12 Labours Of Hercules” games), but Into the Emberlands is NOT exactly a time management game. Instead of the player’s actions depending on the recharge time of the production buildings, the Lightbearer carries a lantern that loses its charge with every step that he takes outside of the town area but fills up as soon as he steps back into town. Thus, how far out you can travel strictly depends on the amount of light stored in your lantern and while there are several ways to partially replenish it on your way, your expeditions will always be gated by your lantern’s capacity.

When exploring the wilds, you get to collect resources, save fellow lost Lightbearers and exchange resources or special items that you find on the way for other resources, upgrades or more substantial rewards. There are several biomes to traverse, but they’re located radially on the map (with the town being at the center), thus reaching them can be done only after you expand your lantern capacity accordingly. The pace at which you progress and how far out you can travel with each run is quite satisfying. The game doesn’t feel grindy at all, and the runs always have a comfortable length – usually, your lantern capacity (including the amounts you can replenish on the way) is big enough to explore the world in one direction until you meet the next biome.

Unlike time management games in which the order of your actions matters for optimizing your pathing, exploring the world in an optimal way is not of utmost importance here. What matters instead is that with any new tile you visit you have enough energy left to return to town, otherwise you die. Dying can substantially set you back, even if the already completed objectives for that stage will not be reverted. You lose the items in your inventory and the resources acquired during that expedition, and perhaps what hurts the progression the most is losing all the upgrades you purchased during that run (lantern capacity, inventory size and the amount of coins you can hold). The amounts you lose still feel rather harsh, despite the developers changing this system to be much less punishing than on release. Luckily, I had only one death but even if it was rather early in my gameplay, it did set me back by around two hours.

The game suffers from the absence of a storage space, clearly noticeable mid and late-game. As you encounter new biomes, you will start amassing new types of resources. Considering that your inventory is very limited (max. 8 slots when fully upgraded) and that it has to hold not only basic resources but also processed ones (flasks), as well as tools to gather these and other rare spawns, it’s easy to see that it gets filled very quickly. As a workaround for the tight space, the game allows you to drop resources to any tile and pick them up later, but whenever you upgrade your town these will be lost because the map is fully regenerated. The lack of a storage mechanic and the cumbersome management of the inventory slots have been the community’s top complaints. Yet it’s been almost a year and the devs decided to focus on implementing other mechanics rather than addressing the most critical one.

It took me around 14 hours to finish the game, including obtaining all the achievements (none of them are missable). Into the Emberlands was a very colorful, fun and relaxing experience and the roguelite mechanic makes the game heavily replayable, however, it does have its flaws and my gameplay was far from bug-free.