Video Game Review: Winter Ember

Developer: Sky Machine Studio

Publisher: Blowfish Studio

Genre: Isometric Stealth

Reviewed On: PlayStation 5

Also Available For: PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

The Basics: Winter Ember is an isometric stealth game in which players assume the role of Arthur Artorias, a former wealthy playboy out for revenge years after his family was killed and he was left for dead. Despite being a very basic premise, I wasn’t about to judge it for that; plenty of games with worse or even no excuse for their action have been fun and engaging experiences. However, upon starting up the game I very quickly realized how obnoxious the execution would be. Certain cutscenes are done in a traditional 2D animation style that looks clunky in motion and even during some still frames, with characters occasionally and inconsistently having bizarre proportions and lip motions rarely matching up to dialogue. The dialogue itself, meanwhile, is contrived and awkward both in terms of individual lines and the broader plot it conveys, not to mention poorly delivered. The opening cutscene felt much longer than it actually was and I felt relief when it was over and I could actually get to the game, which isn’t something that happens often for me.

Still, poor writing isn’t always a reason to summarily dismiss a game – even poorly written games can be enjoyable if you tune out the story. Unfortunately, Winter Ember’s mechanical design is riddled with holes and poor choices. At its core, the gameplay is simple enough and should be familiar to anyone who’s played a stealth game before: stick to the shadows, move slowly to avoid making noise, stay out of enemies’ cones of vision so you can either avoid or murder them, etc. As far as being an isometric stealth game goes, Sky Machine tried to introduce a cover mechanic that, while an interesting mechanic in theory, is actually less than useless in practice.

The player can cozy up to walls, crates, and other obstacles to obscure themselves from guards’ sight and then peek over or around corners, but doing so is actually ironically more likely to get you caught than simply staying out of cover entirely. Trying to get into cover in the first place is a finicky affair, seemingly requiring the player to be at least so far away from something if they want to try and snap to it, at which point Arthur will dash towards it, creating the same amount of noise as if the player were running under normal circumstances. Aside from that, being in cover obscures the players vision in a way that being right up on a wall or crate but not “in cover” does not, and even though one might reasonably assume from a design standpoint that peeking from cover would at the very least make guards take longer to notice Arthur, it actually felt like the opposite was true. I quickly gave up on trying to use cover altogether.

The issues of counter-intuitiveness don’t stop there, however. Arthur comes equipped with a bow – the mark of a true stealthy protagonist in our modern age – that he can craft a number of different kinds of arrows for, ranging from shocking arrows to water arrows which extinguish lamps and blunt arrows that can destroy some parts of the environment. However, not only is the bow utterly useless when it comes to silently dispatching enemies at range, the means of aiming it just feels wrong. When aiming the bow, a white line indicating the trajectory of the arrow appears, which is pretty standard isometric mechanics so far. However, rather than arrows flying straight and true along that path, they will instead try to hit whatever a dot at the end of the line is selecting, and even the logic determining that isn’t very sound. As an example, in the first couple minutes of gameplay there is a tutorial for using the bow that tasks the player with using water arrows to put out a lantern. However, the tutorial does not actually explain the finer points of Winter Ember’s aiming system, which led to me being quite confused initially as to why my arrows were getting stuck in the nearest side of the crates said lantern was sitting on at first. In fact, I’m still confused as to why that’s what happened, as the aiming dot was actually far past both the lantern and the crates before I figured out what the problem was.

There’s also the matter of the game’s skill system. Arthur can buy a number of skills using tokens he finds throughout his adventure, but rather than feeling like a cool way to make yourself more efficient at stealthing around and taking revenge it feels more like a way to get yourself to a state where Arthur is even halfway competent. I don’t want to spend too much time on this except to say that one of the skills is for some reason buying the ability to use more hotkeys. By default, Arthur has an item wheel that allows the player to quick select arrow types but only allows three to be assigned. By spending skill tokens, that number can be bumped up to a grand total of six. Even putting aside potential accessibility issues here – which I do want to clarify is already a big ask for me – there’s absolutely no reason for this to be in the game. Arrows are assigned to the weapon wheel from the item menu, and both the item menu and the weapon wheel pause time when perusing them. As a result, only having three hotkey slots isn’t even an issue of the player needing to plan out encounters beforehand so they can have the arrows they want on hand. There is nothing stopping you from simply pausing the game and switching what you have in your weapon wheel mid-fight aside from it being a tedious and annoying process, which by the way I can almost guarantee will have the side-effect of making players stick to only a couple type of arrow types in the first place to avoid having to move stuff around.

I could go on; I could talk at length about the way combat is clunky even for stealth games, a genre known for trying to discourage openly fighting one’s enemies. I could explain that this game has one of the worst level transitions I’ve ever seen, unceremoniously warping the player from a train platform to on board a train already moving along at high speed without so much as a loading screen in between, or question why the guards automatically suspect Arthur of being up to no good when they see him just walking along in a crowd of other people in a city level, minding his business. However, I went on a bit longer than I meant to with those other things, and I think I’ve made my point by now.

Suffice to say I do not recommend Winter Ember. Though I hold no particular disdain for it in my heart, it simply does not offer anything worth seeing, and I feel confident in saying that even though I was barely able to slog my way through the first couple of hours. When trying to play any more of a game feels like such a chore that I can’t bring myself to pick the controller back up, I take that as a sign that I should just go do something else. In the case of Winter Ember, dear reader, so should you.