This was revealed in one of the earliest PS5 presentations, might have been the first one. It was noted right away to not be exclusive, which is nice. It looked really good graphically, and the gameplay concept seemed pretty fun, so I was excited for this one.

It’s also an indie studio’s first game, which you can’t tell from looking at trailers. The devs previously did some 3D animations for different companies, for ads and such (some of which was pretty nice), so this jump into gaming is definitely an interesting choice.

Let’s see if Ember Lab’s first endeavor in gaming is a good one!

Developer and Publisher: Ember Lab
Release date: September 21st 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5 (PC version played)
Genre: Action-adventure

In this game you play as Kena, a Spirit Guide. She’s in some mountain area where something seems to happen, and she’s there to, well, guide spirits to the afterlife, and remove the corruption in the land. It does seem like she has hear own more selfish reasons for being there, there’s some hints here and there about why, but that’s not really answered. Maybe there’s gonna be a sequel, who knows. Kena meets with a few spirits in this area, as well as small creatures called Rot. They’re cute round black furry thingies that follow you around and sometimes do stuff. Kena needs to get to the Mountain Shrine to destroy the corruption, but before being able to go there she must help some of the spirits from the village pass on, which means exploring areas, finding stuff and fighting monsters that spawn from the corruption. There’s 3 areas you travel through (and a fourth you fight the final boss in) to get to your destination. There’s not too much time spent exploring any of the characters (and Kena less than the spirits), but some of them seem okay. The ending doesn’t answer some questions as far as Kena’s motivations though. You hear about her father once or twice, I dunno.

The most evident thing about this game is how freakishly pretty it is. The areas aren’t SUPER varied, but they look nice and there’s some good background detail. The character animation is super smooth and life-like in the cutscenes, and very good in the gameplay too though you may sometimes notice some weird interactions with the environment here and there. The enemies are also animated well enough that you’ll know when they’re gonna attack and such. Sometimes I almost wished this was a movie. Almost.

So gameplay-wise this is an action adventure game, with a focus on exploration, finding things (kinda collect-a-thon-ish) and combat.

The base game flow is you getting to a small area, which you can explore and find things in, finding where to go to advance the story and either puzzle solving or killing things to progress.. There’s a few collectible types, like fruit (gives you points to learn skills), crystals (you use those to buy hats), hats (which makes them available in the store), meditation spots to increase your max HP, spirit mail (those are side things you bring to mailboxes to open small optional areas) and Rot. Rot doesn’t really do much beyond leveling you up when you get to a certain number. You can put hats on them, it does nothing other than make them look different, so basically that’s 2 collectible types (hats and crystals) that serve no gameplay purpose. You can observe the environment to find these things, but you can also put on whatever your current mask is (there’s 3 different masks but they do the same thing). This lets you look in first-person and it highlights things you can interact with. Specifically Rot is a bit hard to find this way because you find them by finding Rot footprints on the ground, but those don’t always show up at every viewing angle, it’s kinda weird. You do have a few abilities you can use, like directing Rot to grab things (usually to find more Rot or other collectibles), you get a bow (which does have multiple uses in addition to just hitting targets), you get grenades that transforms rubble into platforms. Also Kena can do a spirit pulse thingy where that activates certain crystals, and you sometimes have to move things around to chain puzzles (and also there’s platforming challenges). Some of the puzzles are actually pretty clever, hiding things in the environment to figure out the order of things. Of course you end up in areas with heavy corruption, which is where you’ll fight enemies.

Combat is pretty simple but actually really well done. Kena has 2 based attacks using the right shoulder buttons, with the trigger being the heavy attack. She can obviously use her bow and grenades if she has those. Kena’s basic abilities also include dodging (which works like a pretty standard dodge roll) and the shield, which is done with the energy pulse button. It stops all damage (to a point, it can break if you don’t let it recover for a bit), but if you time it well you parry (and, with the right skill, you can counter-attack from a parry, or gain a Rot action). The Rot have some use in battle (though having more of them I think doesn’t actually do anything as far as combat). They start out scared, but hitting enemies gives them courage, and with enough courage they get a Rot point (up to their max, which starts at one but you can get up to 5). Each Rot point lets you go do one Rot action. There’s a few action they can do in battle. If there’s shiny blue flowers you can send Rot to grab it (once per battle, with one exception) which heals some HP (at first it’s enough for all HP, but eventually it does about half when you have enough max HP). You can power up most of your moves with Rot, may it be the charged heavy strike, the bow or the bomb. And you can point the Rot to an enemy, they’ll go at the enemy to distract them, so you can get some free hits. Some enemies have weak points you can shoot at for extra damage, or require blowing them up to hit their cores or something.

Actually the combat ends up being pretty challenging, since the only way to heal is those blue flowers, and since those are only single-use (and some battles literally don’t have any, and at most there’s gonna be 2), you can’t at all rely on them. You gotta get really good at dodging and parrying, so that you don’t end up needing the heals. I found the dash attack you get near the end of the game to be pretty useful since it stuns, though you do have to be careful since it does use shield energy. I’ve managed to cheese a few of the bosses with that, or with the Rot Hammer which is strangely useful in ways you may not expect. It’s not “guaranteed win” cheese, but cheese nonetheless. Anyways… I actually quite like the combat here, it’s pretty strict but it works super well.

There’s not much else to talk about. You explore, find things, find how to progress (the game does tell you where to go but generally you need to puzzle solve anyways), fight things… Fun. You get points to learn skills, you’re basically sure to get all the skills well before getting to the final area of the game, as long as you get up to 65 Rot, which is simple enough it you look everywhere. Some of the stuff is really well hidden, so unless you’re really thorough, you’ll miss some of those Rot… but you don’t need all of them anyways. It does end pretty quickly though, there’s 2 big areas to go through, and then a few final challenges in the hub area before the final boss.

I do want to talk about PC performance here, because it makes me wonder how this does on the Playstation versions. The performance is definitely a symptom of having a small team working on the game, and with that in mind I really can’t criticize much, but this is a review so let’s talk about it. I run a pretty solid PC here, with a 3700X and a 3060 Ti. It’s not the best machine on the market, but I do commonly run modern games at over 200fps… but not this game. Sort of. The problem is that the framerate is extremely inconsistent regardless of settings (so I was playing at max settings). You can just not move at all and that framerate fluctuates kinda wildly. What’s even weirder is that even with the fluctuation, it hardly stresses the GPU or the CPU. Some areas I was running anywhere between 120-160fps (which is a wide, noticeable range when it does drop), while some areas drop to below 90fps. The area around the village dock actually occasionally dropped to ~50fps, with very visible very low 1% lows to the point where it stutters a bit. Basically there’s no way this game runs well on a console if my MUCH stronger PC struggles in spots. There’s definitely some optimization work that could’ve happened here.

Overall

To say this very simply, I look forward to Ember Lab’s next gaming endeavor, I’ll be hyped when they’ll end up announcing a new game. What they did graphically with this indie game, with a small 15-person team, puts big dumb AAA studios with hundreds of employees to shame… And the gameplay is fun too (which also puts big dumb AAA studios to shame)! The only problem it really has is that there isn’t more of it. This game is QUITE short, but it’s kinda understandable, and it certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome which is a good thing in my mind. I was kinda expecting one more “big” area before the final segment of the game, but I guess I figured there wouldn’t be one because of the final power being unlocked in the second one.

If I had any real complaints gameplay-wise, it would be the under-use of the Rot, basically there’s a few scripted-ish moments you use them to move things around, otherwise they’re just used for powered-up attacks (and I don’t feel like having more actually affected anything beyond your level). I’d like to see more creative puzzles with them, and maybe a way to command several “squads” for puzzles and combat. And there’s some issues with finding stuff. You put a mask on to see stuff in the environment, but that doesn’t always work, especially with Rot footprints that literally don’t appear if you’re not looking at them from the correct angle. Oh, and the Uncharted-style “not-really-platforming” thing where you hang off ledges and just press A when the game tells you… that sucks in every game that does it. And you swim really slow, but there’s not much swimming involved so it’s not too bad.

Really not too much to complain about here, the combat is fun, the graphics are awesome, the animation is great, the exploration is fun… It’s all really good stuff. And you do get extra game time if you try to find everything, and there’s an extra difficulty after finishing the game. So even if it’s short, there’s still content there.

I recommend this one, definitely. I want this game to do well. I hope it’s successful enough so we can see what else Ember Lab could have to offer.

Also it’s not a full price game, which is nice, less of a risk going in, and you can’t argue with the quality considering the price. This could be full price and I’d have been fine with it.