About 5 months ago, UploadVR has given us a showcase showing an assortment of exciting games on VR. Ember Souls was one of the game on there and it definitely caught my attention since the trailer was showing a very promising full fledge action adventure that seemed inspired by the Prince of Persia series. Fast forward to today, I've played and completed the game to it's fullest and it's time for me to share my complete opinion on the game. Will this one be talked about in the many coming months? Or will it be lost in the sands of time. Let's find out!

Ember Souls came out on November 21st, 2024 for $24.99 and is available for the Meta Quest 2, 3 and 3S. The game was developed by VirtualAge who are known for Guardians Frontline. A game inspired by Halo and also contains some cool strategy mechanics in there. If you're on the Meta Quest+ Subscription, make sure to have a look since it's currently part of the service.

Gameplay

So this is a full on action adventure story focused game. Your main goal is to travel in these levels where you'll have an assortment of things to do.

Combat

First, I want to talk about the combat. I've heard many having a mixed opinion on it. But I personally enjoyed it. You get a lot of mechanics that you can use to your advantage. You have your typical sword that you can swing to deal damage to the enemy, but let say that there's an archer at a distance, I love picking up my small dagger and throwing it at them so they don't disrupt me from my close combat. And when you are overwhelmed by enemies, you have special abilities that you can do like a big push, or flames coming out of your hands for example, but you acquire many more abilities that you can take advantage of. Some enemies have armor, so you have to make sure to hit them at spots that they can't block, and there's a variety of enemies like skeletons, mages, and even bats. I had a fun time in the combat most of the time.

Parkour

Another part of the game is the parkour, and this is where the Prince of Persia mechanics come into place. So you'll get parts in the game were you'll need to do some wall riding to reach an obstacle, or when you're very high and need to reach the ground floor, you'll get parts where you have to grab a banner to slide down without getting fall damage. You will also encounter rooms with some deadly traps that you have to avoid with some quick time reaction. The main protagonist also have possession of a bow and arrows, which can be useful sometimes to activate grabbable sections, and things like that.

Puzzles

The last main aspect of the gameplay are puzzles! They are pretty light, but that's understandable since you want to have a large variety of players finishing the game. You'll get things like reflecting a beam of light in the proper position. But my favorite puzzle is when you have to call your falcon friend and look through his eyes to find the code to open a door. It just brings a little bit of variety that I appreciate. There are some optional and mandatory puzzle sections.

Story

The main protagonist is called Kasim, and you go on a trip to find out what has happened to your immortal friends at the palace. To your surprise, you're greeted by a falcon named Alshain, and you learn that all of your friends has either been killed, or possessed by some dark magic that's happening.

Throughout your adventure, you also encounter a lady named Arya who you rescue, and then learn about the 4 magic stones that you need to find to break the spell from this giant palace.

I loved the story overall, it doesn't overstay its welcome and pretty easy to follow. There are some nice interaction between the falcon and the hero. Sometimes they even have some small funny moments.

Although, one nitpick that I have is that they both have kind of a similar voice. So sometimes it would take me a moment before I could differentiate both voices. I've learned that the developers are actually re-working the voices and we should see a new patch for it sometime soon, so this could definitely not be an issue in a bit. Something that was also recently added is positioning audio, so you'll know exactly who's talking by knowing where they're talking from.

Modes

So the main campaign took me around 6 hours to complete on the hardest difficulty, and it was a solid 6 hours. It didn't drag too much, and I find that it wasn't too short either. There are some replayability aspect since there are prisoners and collectables that you have to find in all 15 levels of the campaign.

Raid

There is a side mode that you can play called Raid. You basically have access to a bunch of dungeons that you can play where you have to find the exit as fast as possible. You get a nice map on your wrist that will help you to find the location that you need to go. It's great if you've finished the game, but just want more of it. What's nice is that all of the experience and money that you get from the raid, transfers over to your main campaign. So you can grind and get some nice perk if you want to! But it's not necessary. There is also a weekly showcased raid that you can do, which is great because this is where you'll find a bunch of people trying to be on the top.

Sandbox

Another mode currently available is sandbox. You can select the type of obstacles that you want to have in your arena, the type of enemies that you want to fight, the weapons, and also other little settings. It is fun if you want to practice the combat or just play around with things.

When we look at the menu, looks like we'll also be seeing a mixed reality mode in the future, but it is not currently available.

Graphics

When I started the game, a concern to me that came right away is that this could be an asset flip, or just a quick cash grab. But when playing, you can see that there has been enough work in it to be it's own unique visuals. It's not amazing, but also, it doesn't feel cheap. It's right in the middle. There are some locations that are very well crafted and thought of, to a point where I stopped and just looked at the scenery to appreciate what I was seeing. It's well balanced.

Music

The music did stand out to me, and I was not expecting that! I find that the composition just really hits well with the style of the game and just plain well done. I especially love around the end of the game where the music gets intense, I just wish that the intensity of the song would last longer because I was really vibing during that part haha.

Bugs

So, you know, the game is not perfect. I've encountered a lot of issues during my playthrough and I've reported all of them to the developers. 10 in total and this is why you're seeing numbers on this since this is the detailed video that I've sent them. Thankfully, the devs are super committed at fixing and tweaking the game and we've just received a new patch that fixed many of the issues that I had. Like this bug where I got transported to another dimension for example, you won't see that one.

But there are bugs still happening like an infinite loading time, or weird graphical and fps glitch that happened to me from time to time. This is still being investigated. Another one is there's a few times where I was able to get out of bound, and there is this one time where an enemy got through a wall, and it took a long time for it to respawn back so I could continue the level, but at least it did end up getting unstuck.

The game is fun, I really enjoyed my time with it and it's very well constructed. But because of the issues that it's having right now, it did affect the fun factor a little. With the new patch, I think that it's worth a purchase because it is one awesome journey that you're going through, but maybe it's worth waiting a little bit also because they are still reworking on things like the voice acting and they are also improving things in the combat. So what i can say is that your playthrough will be more enjoyable than mine, and that's telling something because I did enjoy it!