Silent Games and Secret Mode have announced that their acrobatic, pensive action-RPG Empyreal will launch on 8th May, with a demo still available on Steam. I hadn’t come across Empyreal before, but I already have Opinions, mostly positive. Firstly, the fonts for damage number pop-ups are… weirdly stringy, given the heft and colour of the character models and environments. There’s barely any meat on them. It makes me feel like I’m beating up a checkout machine, not thwacking golems.
Secondly, I quite like the looks of the game’s four biomes, which “reflect certain philosophical principles”, in the words of game director James Rogers. Going by fleeting glimpses from the below seven minute overview video, there’s a Nature world and a Technology world and a dessicated biome that reminds me of Rime, with a scalding blue sky that consists of tumbledown hexagonal plates.
Watch on YouTube
The biomes are housed inside a huge alien Monolith. Your job, as an “elite mercenary” equipped with a choice of wizardly halberds, hipfiring railguns and spells on cooldown, is to investigate that monolith and duff up ancient robots while excavating the mysteries of a lost civilisation. The lost civilisation may yet harbour certain lessons for the “modern world”, including the idea of history as a journey towards some greater goal. I probably don’t need to tell you that it also harbours a lot of loot. Hopefully you’ll be able to easily distinguish the stuff you want to smash/turn into shoulder pads from the bits that plug into the grander narrative themes.
The third-person combat puts me a little in mind of the recent Eternal Strands, though it doesn’t have the latter’s real-time physics and destruction. I think it looks fun, though I find certain animations a bit jerky.
The spread of realms, meanwhile, makes me think of Gunfire’s Remnant 2. Unlike the Gunfire game, however, Empyreal doesn’t have procedurally generated environments. The layouts are hand-made, but you can alter their chemistry by means of items called Cartograms, which determine the overall odds and the kinds of enemies and drops you’ll encounter, and can be gifted to other players. I like the sounds of this. Nightingale has a similar system involving tarot cards.
You can also gift players items through dimensional tears and stumble upon their slain spectres via the asymmetrical online functionality, but it’s a single player experience on the whole. Story seems to arrive by way of the NPCs you’ll chat to at your base outside the Monolith – each has their own questline with several endings.
Intrigued? I’ve got a Steam link for you. Here, catch!
