Disclaimer: this review was done on a pre-release beta copy of the game.
Coming in hot on Steam is Emberlight, a new roguelike dungeon crawler from developer Quarter Onion. As The Arcadist's resident Dungeon Crawler Crawler, I jumped on the opportunity to try out a new player to the genre
This review took me a long time to write. Aside from my usual laziness and lack of writing ability, most of this is because it took me a long time to figure out how I felt about the game. At first, the irregular approach to the dungeon crawler genre was somewhat off-putting to me, and the lack of a hand-holding tutorial hurt my poor dumb brain. The game starts you at a screen where you select your mission, your party, and a shop before you launch into the real gameplay. Getting into the action is pretty quick, and thankfully Quarter Onion has tutorials across the top of the screen to assist you in the literal dungeon the game just threw you in.
Let's talk about the gameplay itself. Emberlight has you traversing a dungeon or cave or what have you of differing numbers of floors and difficulties depending on the mission you selected. Character advancement is not handled through traditional equipment or an experience system, but instead pulled directly from your enemies. Watching an enemy use one of its skills on its teammates or, more likely, against you has a chance for you to learn that ability and be able to distribute it among your party at the end of that fight.
These abilities will very quickly outperform the ones you learned just a few rooms ago and definitely the ones you begin with. Slotting in multiple skills of the same type has a few other effects such as offering bonuses for that type of skill, and will eventually corrupt your party in different ways. It's a pretty unique take on dungeon crawling and quite refreshing, but it's not without a couple of flaws. The stats displayed on the skills are a little complicated to understand and it takes a while to get a good grasp on. The game helpfully offers an encyclopedia to assist here, but I ran into some technical issues with it
Almost like reading a Terms of Service up in here amirite?
As I continued to get the hang of things through some brutal trial-and-error I started to have more fun with it, being able to take on harder and longer missions. Understanding the nuances of what skills to apply to which party members, understanding the corruption system, and conquering the somewhat clunky UI showed me a really unique game that I was able to really appreciate for its vision. If you've played some dungeon crawler games in the past, getting into and enjoying this game is a definite possibility. It's not a terribly deep experience, think more "Dungeon Casual." The game has elements of story but doesn't invest enough into it to detract from the action, which is honestly A-OK with me. It's an honest game that doesn't go beyond the scope of its vision or beyond the ability of its team, which is something I can appreciate.
If I have a genuine hardline complaint, it's probably the sound. As a whole it's not terrible, though maybe a bit mediocre, until you run into a fight with the rats. Oh, the rats... I don't normally like to nitpick on such a specific thing but dang. I admittedly reach for the mute button every time I run into one of those bastards.
You know, the true friends were the RRREEEEGEHEGGREHGHEGREHRGEH we made along the way...
Still, while audio definitely isn't this game's strong area, I have a soft spot for games that I can mute and listen to some podcasts while I play and it won't detract from the experience. Quarter Onion has also addressed the biggest issue I personally had when launching in the first time, the navigation, by making an expanded tutorial. Touches like this show the studio is really listening to feedback and targeting areas that people want addressed the most, which is a big reason why I'm not hanging my opinion of Emberlight on the issues I had in pre-release.
