Fun with friends and nothing more.

Ember Knights was gifted to me, which was good, because it's the exact kind of game that asks a bit too much for what it offers. $25.99 CAD is a premium for a game with as small a scope as this, and, regrettably, what I think is an equally small amount of ambition.

There’s something about the visual style of Ember Knights that sits weirdly with me. I look at all of this lavish pixel art and all of the frames of complex animation required to make these more massive enemies move around the screen and I get this vague feeling of corporate sludge lingering over the whole thing. It’s a difficult feeling to articulate, but it’s certainly something of a trend that I’ve noticed. We’ve collectively come a long, long way from games like Braid in all of their shitty, incredibly amateur pixelated glory, and between games like this, and Eastward, and Dead Cells, and Owlboy, I’m almost starting to feel like indie titles are just expected to look like this now. A large part of what I find interesting about the indie scene — insofar as you can call it that, given that “single-A” would be a more accurate term to describe how nearly all of them release now under the banner of newer, smaller publishing houses — is the lack of inherent convention. When you make a game as an individual or a team of individuals that don’t need to answer to anyone but yourselves, you have an obscene amount of freedom to make a game exactly as you want to. There’s something about this art style and the way that everything looks that doesn’t feel as though it was made because the team thought it was an inherently good idea, but rather because it’s become convention in this space to have ridiculously lavish pixel art with constantly moving parts and Cintiq-breaking amounts of detail.

It’s certainly a little funny to see how the indie scene is mirroring the larger games industry at the turn of the millennium; devs initially made 2D pixel art games because that’s what the hardware could support. As 3D tools hit the market and became easier to use, more devs moved to 3D; the ones that didn’t used the more powerful systems they now had access to in order to hone the pixel art even further. I suppose I’m less impressed now simply by virtue of the fact that we’ve already been through all of this about twenty-five years ago. Anything that defies convention rather than adhering to a quarter-century-old dogma is going to be inherently more interesting, I feel, and Ember Knights largely seems like it looks the way that it does because “that’s just how indie games look now”. Sure, this would have blown the socks off of your feet if you saw this in 1998, but you could put screenshots from about twenty different indie games with a moderate budget next to this and not be able to notice a difference between them all. Ember Knights isn't the first to do it, and it also isn't the best, which leaves it in this strange milieu of having something incredibly technically impressive looking kind of bland.

If you've ever played Hades, this is what Hades would be if it didn't have a single memorable character. Some of you out there are cringing at that statement hard enough for me to feel it in the past as I write this. Hades is as much a story game as it is a gameplay game, and arguably more of the former than the latter; I dropped Hades the second the credits rolled because I was just that satisfied with how the post-game wrapped up. I didn't feel any need to start playing on a story-less endless mode, because I was both happy with the ending and I didn't think the gameplay was deep nor engaging enough to play strictly for its own sake. It still provides a great framework that remains enjoyable all the way until the story ends, but I felt no compulsion to return for more.

Without wanting to dedicate any more time to talking about Hades in this Ember Knights review, I'll say that Ember Knights left me completely unsatisfied. Having the two piece combo of a start-nowhere go-nowhere story with characters that barely exist and incredibly rudimentary gameplay biting off something shallow and managing to make it even shallower is just kind of sad. The game really isn't hard, and every run plays the same with very minor changes based on whether you've got a ranged or melee weapon; if ranged, sit back and flick projectiles until you have energy to cast spells. If melee, spam the dodge roll with a hundred thousand invincibility frames and smack your foes as you come out of your roll, and then spam spells. Most of the arsenal is completely worthless anyway, with the wand being the obviously-best ranged weapon and the scythe being the obviously-best melee. Half the spells wind up being useless, too. Nobody is taking the fucking ballista. Upgrades are all minor side-grades that all accomplish the vaguely similar goals of "monsters in the room die faster" or "you die slower", only really offering stat bonuses rather than new mechanical depth. Whether you're doing a lightning build or a poison build or a fire build or an armor build or a crit rate build, your dual strategies of "pick ranged and sit back while flicking spells" or "pick melee and dodge roll while flicking spells" never change in any meaningful way. All it determines are which items you're going to prioritize picking up during a run. If you swapped the names and the colors for fire and poison, nobody would notice. They do the exact same thing. It's all just numbers changes.

Ultimately, Ember Knights just looks and feels and plays like too many other things, all without actually differentiating itself from its contemporaries. You can't say that it was some sort of effortless hack-job, because there's clearly been an obscene amount of work pumped into this, but that just makes it sting all the worse when the final work comes out to be this bland. It's like spending a year in the kitchen to make a loaf of Wonder Bread. It's an awful lot of time spent on making something that can only manage to offer an experience you'll get both better and cheaper elsewhere.

This is the Golden Corral of video games.