I've just finished playing The Lost Ember: Rekindled Edition, an exploration walking simulator developed and published by Mooneye Studios. The base game took around eight hours to complete all achievements, whereas the Legendary Souls DLC is around another one to two hours' worth of content.
The Yanrana were once a powerful civilization whose tribes occupied the lands, inhabiting the ruins of an even older people, the Machu'ruku. Due to unknown circumstances, the Yanrana vanished from the lands, which are now entirely occupied by animals. Amidst these wild lands, a lost spirit encounters a solitary wolf. When the pair discovers the skeleton of a Yanrana, the spirit remembers Yanrana folklore about a soul who was barred entry into the City of Light, cursed to wander as a Lost Ember. The spirit deduces this must've been Wolf's fate, and so the two set out together to find the City of Light—the final resting place where Yanrana spirits have sheltered since time immemorial.
Overly talkative and quick to theorize, the Yammering Spirit accompanies Wolf as they relive past memories through frozen-frame-style cutscenes. The Yammering Spirit deduces the likely identity of Wolf's past life and believes the reason they were not admitted entry to the City of Light is because of this past life's sins. Gaining entry to the City of Light will require remembering all of Wolf's past, so the two hunt down the memories, learning more about each other along the way.
The story is, to put it gently, rather boring. The stakes from the beginning are questionable, with Wolf seemingly having lived a life of contentment prior to the arrival of the Yammering Spirit. The imbalance of character stakes, given the spirit's present incorporeality, makes it difficult to invest in Wolf's journey. Even as the story reveals the mysteries of the past, I found myself uninterested in what it was saying. Predictability was a major factor in my overall reception of its story, which lacked the subtlety necessary to execute its twist ending impactfully.
Far from a guiding ally, the Yammering Spirit frequently comes across as condescending, regularly chastising Wolf for the actions of their past. To the developers' credit, players can actually choose to disable the Yammering Spirit's dialogue entirely. It was a setting I considered enabling, due not only to poor dialogue, but also to a very weak voice performance by the actor. The general vibe is like playing God of War, if Mimir never had anything interesting to say. These are tough criticisms to overcome, because the Yammering Spirit narrates every cutscene in the game. Narration might be too generous a descriptor, as these cutscenes are often just the spirit asking questions, like a five-year-old trying to follow the plot of Paw Patrol. "Is that... you starting the fire?" "Are they... walking over that bridge?" These sorts of incessant questions quickly wore out their welcome for me and challenged my patience with the story overall.
The gameplay of Lost Ember is akin to a walking-sim-style format of linear narrative progression. The game contains a large amount of collectibles across both the base game and the DLC, to the point that classifying it as a collectathon feels equally reasonable.
Each area of the game is broken up into open-zone-style exploration segments. At the end of the zone is a red barrier, which the Yammering Spirit can't pass through until Wolf recollects the primary memory from the location. Thus, a playthrough of Lost Ember could be substantially streamlined by focusing only on recollecting memories and progressing the main story.
The main gimmick of Lost Ember is Wolf's ability to spirit-transfer into other animals across the world, such as wombats, parrots, and fish. Certain animals have special traits, like flight or swimming, which allow them to access locations normally inaccessible to Wolf. For players seeking all collectibles, the "fun" is swapping between animals to find hidden mushrooms and relics.
Unfortunately, Lost Ember fails to evolve this gameplay gimmick across Wolf's journey. A wombat is only ever good at being small enough to fit in holes, so you'll always find one next to a hole. A mole can only ever dig under obstacles, so you'll only ever use them for that purpose. Beyond the short-lived novelty of moving these animals differently than Wolf, I found nothing about swapping between animals contributed to an enjoyable experience.
While the game can be fun to look at in this remastered experience, it's also plagued by a wide variety of bugs and poor optimization. Not often one to complain about performance, I found it hard to ignore so many bugs in a game with such a simple premise. Frame drops between areas are among the worst I've seen in any video game, often freezing the screen for several seconds. Wolf frequently clips through the map, falling into walls. Animal animations will break, leaving creatures in comical T-poses while magically flying through the air. At one point, half a zone's geometry failed to load, forcing a restart. The developers provided an "unstick player" mechanic, which never seemed to work when Wolf was stuck. If this were a more mechanically ambitious title, I'd be inclined to overlook some of these glitches; however, the simplicity of the game's design makes the bugs more obvious, and the lack of a patch all the more questionable.
My overall experience with Lost Ember was disappointing, and it's not a title I'd recommend to others. I enjoyed some of the game's beautiful vistas, but struggled to find other redeeming qualities. There is a wide range of bugs and poor optimizations, which should've been fixed by this remaster. Like Wolf's soul leaving its body, I found myself regularly dissociating to reach the credits.
The Yanrana were once a powerful civilization whose tribes occupied the lands, inhabiting the ruins of an even older people, the Machu'ruku. Due to unknown circumstances, the Yanrana vanished from the lands, which are now entirely occupied by animals. Amidst these wild lands, a lost spirit encounters a solitary wolf. When the pair discovers the skeleton of a Yanrana, the spirit remembers Yanrana folklore about a soul who was barred entry into the City of Light, cursed to wander as a Lost Ember. The spirit deduces this must've been Wolf's fate, and so the two set out together to find the City of Light—the final resting place where Yanrana spirits have sheltered since time immemorial.
Overly talkative and quick to theorize, the Yammering Spirit accompanies Wolf as they relive past memories through frozen-frame-style cutscenes. The Yammering Spirit deduces the likely identity of Wolf's past life and believes the reason they were not admitted entry to the City of Light is because of this past life's sins. Gaining entry to the City of Light will require remembering all of Wolf's past, so the two hunt down the memories, learning more about each other along the way.
The story is, to put it gently, rather boring. The stakes from the beginning are questionable, with Wolf seemingly having lived a life of contentment prior to the arrival of the Yammering Spirit. The imbalance of character stakes, given the spirit's present incorporeality, makes it difficult to invest in Wolf's journey. Even as the story reveals the mysteries of the past, I found myself uninterested in what it was saying. Predictability was a major factor in my overall reception of its story, which lacked the subtlety necessary to execute its twist ending impactfully.
Far from a guiding ally, the Yammering Spirit frequently comes across as condescending, regularly chastising Wolf for the actions of their past. To the developers' credit, players can actually choose to disable the Yammering Spirit's dialogue entirely. It was a setting I considered enabling, due not only to poor dialogue, but also to a very weak voice performance by the actor. The general vibe is like playing God of War, if Mimir never had anything interesting to say. These are tough criticisms to overcome, because the Yammering Spirit narrates every cutscene in the game. Narration might be too generous a descriptor, as these cutscenes are often just the spirit asking questions, like a five-year-old trying to follow the plot of Paw Patrol. "Is that... you starting the fire?" "Are they... walking over that bridge?" These sorts of incessant questions quickly wore out their welcome for me and challenged my patience with the story overall.
The gameplay of Lost Ember is akin to a walking-sim-style format of linear narrative progression. The game contains a large amount of collectibles across both the base game and the DLC, to the point that classifying it as a collectathon feels equally reasonable.
Each area of the game is broken up into open-zone-style exploration segments. At the end of the zone is a red barrier, which the Yammering Spirit can't pass through until Wolf recollects the primary memory from the location. Thus, a playthrough of Lost Ember could be substantially streamlined by focusing only on recollecting memories and progressing the main story.
The main gimmick of Lost Ember is Wolf's ability to spirit-transfer into other animals across the world, such as wombats, parrots, and fish. Certain animals have special traits, like flight or swimming, which allow them to access locations normally inaccessible to Wolf. For players seeking all collectibles, the "fun" is swapping between animals to find hidden mushrooms and relics.
Unfortunately, Lost Ember fails to evolve this gameplay gimmick across Wolf's journey. A wombat is only ever good at being small enough to fit in holes, so you'll always find one next to a hole. A mole can only ever dig under obstacles, so you'll only ever use them for that purpose. Beyond the short-lived novelty of moving these animals differently than Wolf, I found nothing about swapping between animals contributed to an enjoyable experience.
While the game can be fun to look at in this remastered experience, it's also plagued by a wide variety of bugs and poor optimization. Not often one to complain about performance, I found it hard to ignore so many bugs in a game with such a simple premise. Frame drops between areas are among the worst I've seen in any video game, often freezing the screen for several seconds. Wolf frequently clips through the map, falling into walls. Animal animations will break, leaving creatures in comical T-poses while magically flying through the air. At one point, half a zone's geometry failed to load, forcing a restart. The developers provided an "unstick player" mechanic, which never seemed to work when Wolf was stuck. If this were a more mechanically ambitious title, I'd be inclined to overlook some of these glitches; however, the simplicity of the game's design makes the bugs more obvious, and the lack of a patch all the more questionable.
My overall experience with Lost Ember was disappointing, and it's not a title I'd recommend to others. I enjoyed some of the game's beautiful vistas, but struggled to find other redeeming qualities. There is a wide range of bugs and poor optimizations, which should've been fixed by this remaster. Like Wolf's soul leaving its body, I found myself regularly dissociating to reach the credits.
