Into the Emberlands Review

A cute relaxing roguelike in which you collect resources and people to rebuild your city. It has no missable achievements. It is in early access, so more achievements might be added later.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 10 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: It is a roguelike, so it depends on your skill level
Is there a good guide available: Not yet
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

I love the cozy artwork Into the Emberlands has! Tiny Roar has its own very adorable and cute art style that can be seen through all their games. I love the promise of a roguelite in which you have only X amount of time to explore, in this case, you have to manage the distance of how far you wander into the wilderness before having to return home. It reminds me a lot of Flame Keeper & Fireside.

You are a cute little lightbearer in this game who has to manage the light in their lantern while trying to find the resources and people to restore and grow the city. If you return to the city your lantern will fill up again. On your way, you can find items to restore a tiny bit and if you rescue people you also restore a tiny bit. However, if you ever run out of light you’ll die and restart back from the city. All the resources are gone again and also upgrades you found along the way for your backpack, lantern, keyring, and anything else are reset as well. And the people you saved but didn’t put into a building are also reset. The map is random, so they all will spawn again, you just don’t know how. The buildings you finish before you run out of light don’t reset, so that is progress you keep.

Into the Emberland is still in early access and is very actively worked on. The devs are responsive on the Steam forums and on Discord as well. There are a few things I hope to see improved on. The first thing would be that keys like wasd to allow you to watch around the map, you can do that now while holding the right mouse button but that kinda sucks as a combination for something you might want to do quite a bit. And I hope the rewards for finishing stuff in the city would be permanent. Now if you upgrade the city, you might increase the total light in your lantern, but the moment you failed a run, that is totally gone. I understand that you can’t keep it all, because there are options in the wild to increase the maximum amount of light as well, but it also felt not rewarding to have it for a moment and then it is gone again if you made a mistake. This is part of playing a roguelike/roguelite, and I understand that, but I just wish for a little more permanent upgrades.

None of the achievements are missable as that is the nice part of a roguelike/roguelite game. Some need some dedication to unlock but they are very doable. I like how they added achievements for not only increasing the city and finishing the requirements for buildings but also for side quests like returning a key and getting to a maximum of 100 light in your lantern in a run.

I give Into the Emberlands 3,5 out of 5 stars.

This review for Into the Emberlands was written on 26 June 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 34 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.