Ember Souls

Ember Souls is a VR action adventure game by VirtualAge that caught my interest because it looked like Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed. The main selling point of the game was parkour in VR and I was interested in trying that out in a different game than Assassin's Creed.

You, as the player, are the last immortal, the only person that can wield all Ember Stones that grant unthinkable powers. To gain their powers one needs to find them first as they are scattered around in a Persian looking palace. The palace being also the home of a Shadow Sultan that you are meant to beat and save the inhabitants. The palace is a maze to be explored by parkour-style movement, there are traps like you'd expect from Prince of Persia, and some enemies wander around.

In the opening scene we are on a boat arriving at the palace. Upon reaching the palace gate, we find out the gate won't open. A blue falcon enters the scene and tells us that that we need to climb over the wall and sneak into the palace. That is where our adventure begins and pretty much that is all the story we get.

Primary gameplay element is parkour. The player can climb, wall run, jump, swing between poles/chandeliers or slide down tapestries/ropes. You can view the rooms in palace as puzzles that the player needs to navigate using this parkour-style movement. Unfortunately there is one set path so there is not much freedom of movement. It starts with very easy tutorial-like areas but the deeper we get the harder is to navigate the rooms.

The controls are good but the behavior of highlighting the next grabbing point and actually grabbing it does not always behave the same. One can easily miss and die and start over again.

Ember stones that we collect give us two abilities that can be used in combat or in our platforming adventure. The first abilities we get is air push that can destroy items or hit enemies. The second ability doubles as a grappling hook. Water stone will give us the ability to freeze water, Fire stone can help us burn stuff and Earth stone will gives us the power to produce our own vines that we can scale. These powers seems underwhelming and mostly not needed. When we get too creative using these powers the game will not allow us to continue as there is a certain path we are supposed to follow or we get completely stuck in the environment.

The protagonists presence in the palace does not go unseen. Enemies guard the palace and for that there is a simple combat system. It's more of a hack and slash, nothing more to it. While Ember stone abilities can make it more interesting, there is mostly no need to use special abilities or different weapons which leaves us with bland combat. Boss battles are a different story. Since they require you to do something specific but the combat is not fully functional, it can become very frustrating or boring to beat the boss (I was also losing weapons mid-combat which made it even more frustrating).

Enemies leave behind coins that can be collected and new weapons or armor can be bought. Nonetheless the weapons don't have abilities (except one weapon) and the armor is also not worth the money that is scarce. For me, as a long time RPG player, the new items or upgraded abilities are not enticing.

Ember Souls's atmosphere is definitely a strong point. The palace is very nicely looking place even though it gets repetitive after few hours of play. One can stop and enjoy the surroundings, feel immersed for a bit.

Soundtrack and sound design are nice. The voice acting even in its current non-AI form is not good and can break the immersion for many.

The game offers a campaign mode with the main story described above, sandbox mode and raid mode. Raids are procedurally generated maps that you can try to run through as fast as you can. They also contain treasures where rare items can be found. In sandbox mode you can test the combat.

Ember Souls is visually beautiful but also technically ambitious project that wants us to experience a smooth parkour-style movement, little bit of exploration, puzzles, and combat. Unfortunately the game is not that well executed and probably needed a longer development period. Considering the game was nearly unplayable before launch and very buggy after release, the developers did managed to fix many things and listened to the players' feedback.

This game can be fun for those who want to become masters running through raids but if platforming is not your cup of tea I would not recommend this game.

And don't forget to pet the spirit bird, he purrs.