I’ve had Emberville on my radar for a while now, and even featured it in one of my Indie Wednesday articles because of how much it impressed me. Diving deeper into Emberville and the development studio Cygnus Cross made me respect the project even more. If you didn’t know, Cygnus Cross was co-created by the streamer Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassel, but before that he was teasing bits of his ideas in his streams before then. What started out as a small idea and passion project is now sprouting into something massive with huge talent behind it, and not without reason. Emberville has some awesome ideas, and after the prologue I played, it is shaping up to be something truly special.

If you don’t already know, Emberville is an action RPG that is a blend of Diablo and Stardew Valley. Waking up with in a vast magical prison called the Vitromatus, with no memories of who you are, you set off on a quest of discovery. The combat gives the player agency in how they want to play by not locking you to any sort of classes or specific abilities. As you use each weapon and armor class, you will get proficient with that weapon and unlock abilities and skills. Couple that with a life sim aspect where you will rebuild destroyed towns, help the townspeople, and invest in your own property and farms. All the while uncovering the mysteries of the Vitromotus.

Um, hello neighbor?

If that doesn’t sound cool enough, the voice over cast is immense. We are talking Alex Jordan (Cyberpunk 2077, The Alters), Doug Cockle (The Witcher 3, Alan Wake II),  Abubakar Salim (Assassin’s Creed Origins, Tales of Kenzera: Zau), and Amelia Tyler (Baldur’s Gate III, Hades II), Ben Starr (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Final Fantasy XVI), and Matthew Mercer (from so much I can’t choose). As if the hits don’t keep going they have none other than the Game Awards queen herself, Jennifer English, as well. And that isn’t even all the great voice actors either, I would be going on for ever. I recommend checking out there main page to see them all!

Now that I hopefully have your interest, let me talk about the couple hours that I got to play of Emberville. The preview starts at the prologue, waking up in an abandoned building after creating my character. The character creator isn’t super detailed, but it offers enough hair styles, colors, facial hair, and undergarment colors to get you going. Besides, fairly quickly you’ll be covering up in all sorts of armor anyway.

Since this is an ARPG like Diablo, there will be plenty of gear!

Immediately the mystery sets its hooks in as I get absolutely gibbed by a grim reaper looking character as soon as I set out of the building. Respawning right back where I started, death being only a minor set back. Where am I? What is this place? And where is everyone? Some of this is slightly answered in the description of the game, but you will uncover what this magical prison is and who built it. But the goal now is finding out why you’re here and how to escape. As you explore, you’ll uncover texts that will give you more clues about the Vitromotus and why this current town is abandoned.

As I left the initial deserted town, I soon ran into trouble and got a taste of the combat. Through exploration I already uncovered a few different weapons. I had some brass knuckles, a bow, and some basic light armor to defend myself with. If I have a choice I will always choose sneaky bow characters, so naturally, I went with the bow. Blasting enemies from afar feels a bit over powered at the moment, or at least this early in the game, but I didn’t mind.

Navigating the traps while using the bow to keep enemies at a distance was a good choice.

The early level design is fairly straight forward with some environmental traps and some other branching rooms to go into for gear to collect. Since this is a Diablo-lite, collecting gear will happen a lot. Either you’re going to find it in the side areas, or from defeating harder enemies. What I love about the gameplay though is how you can tailor it to however style you like to play. Obviously, since I was using my bow often, I was leveling up skills with my bow. This allowed me to unlock the ability to have charge shots. As well as using more light armor unlocked perks if I was fully equipped with light armor.

While gear and weapon skills will level up as you use them, character stats are increased using experience points from fighting. You will be able to allocate points into your character attributes like strength, intelligence, dexterity and so forth. Each attribute will increase your effectiveness with the corresponding set of weapons and armor. This is pretty standard, strength will better your stats with larger weapons, intelligence with staffs, and dexterity with bows etc. They also increase some of your other sub stats as well like critical hit power and chance, block chance, attack rate and much more. You will be building your character how you see fit and how you really want to play.

You will unlock masteries for weapons, armor, and even skills like cooking and crafting the more you just use them.

As I continued through Emberville diving deeper into it mysteries, and talking to a strange old man that was able to provide more information on the Vitromotus, I unlocked my first class: The Wanderer. Classes behave much like your weapons and armor, you aren’t bound to any of them and they will level up individually as you use them. Each class comes with its own set of skills, abilities, and perks as well. You can freely swap between classes at any time letting you choose what is best for each scenario. Classes can be found while exploring, and completing tasks, and missions so keep an eye out for them.

Equipping The Wanderer class, I was then greeted with a skill tree that showed multiple tiers of unlocks all the way to level 40. For now, I was able to equip Focus Strike, a powerful punch attack. As well as, Swift Foot that increased my movement speed. As I leveled up the class I would be able to equip two active and two passive skills as well. As a fast bow character trying to keep my distance, the Swift Foot ability was a great find.

The Wanderer Class is just one of the many you can freely swap between and level up by just using them.

As I continued through the Vitromotus, I finally came to my first boss the Spider Matriarch. This is a huge spider with a golden skull covering its large abdomen. The Spider Matriarch was the first fight where I really needed to use my dodge move a lot. She would shoot webs at me that would stick me in place allowing her to do a charge attack to bash me and then swipe at me up close. She would move fast, so staying on your toes was key. I’m glad I had a bow for this fight, because standing toe-to-eight legs didn’t seem very smart.

After doing damage, I noticed she would run off and regain her health as her spider minions would attack me. Me the next time she did that I followed her to see what she was doing, and sure enough she was eating from these sacks scattered around the arena to refill her health. My next goal was to run around and destroy all the sacks before engaging her again. This allowed me to continue fighting without her being able to refill her health. Eventually, and almost using all my health items, I defeated the Spider Matriarch.

This dang spider kept wrapping me up!

After the boss fight there was just a lot of story stuff I went through that is setting up the post prologue game, so I won’t bother getting into the details here. However, what I played so far has me absolutely pumped to play the rest of Emberville. The gameplay and skill system is so engaging, I always love an RPG that molds itself around how the player actually plays the game. It gives you so much more agency in how you craft your specific builds, and there is a ton of variety here.

My only couple of issues I noticed is that controller support wasn’t working all that well. For whatever reason, in the menus I couldn’t get to certain areas of the inventory with the controller. I ended up just using keyboard and mouse for this playthrough, but this seems like a perfect game for controller. I’m sure that is just a bug or an issue that is easily fixed for the early access launch. My only other want, would have been a quick was to swap between at least two weapons. You can put a weapon in your item bar to equip, but there is no way to swap back to your previous weapon. Otherwise, I would have had to use both my item slots for weapons to swap between.

Other than that, it was a flawless preview that ran fantastic and it got me so excited to play more. Between all the weapon perks, magic abilities, classes, there is going to be a ton to dive into with the launch. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Emberville, this preview didn’t even have any of the life sim and building aspects included in it!

Emberville comes out in Early Access on Steam October 27th, 2026. Consoles are planned, but that will be roughly 18 months after the Early Access launch.