The Early Access Report - Reka
Early Access is often a troubling proposition. Is the game ready for the public or are the public just glorified beta testers? That’s where we come in. Welcome to the Early Access Report, where Player 2’s writers tackle an early access title to determine if it is worth your time now, or is something you should keep an eye on in the future.
Key Information
The Game: Reka
The Pitch:
The Game Version This Report is Based On: 0.1.83.18780b
The Developer: Emberstorm Entertainment
I remember hearing from a friend that folklore was a way to share our history, teach about our culture and pass on lessons. It was incredibly important to her in a way that it’s hard for me to describe as a non-First Nations Australian. Since then, and partially due to my love of history and cryptids of the world, I’ve tried to experience as many games based on folklore as possible. Reka falls into my wishes easily, whilst adding some delightful house mechanics.
You begin by customising your little witch. Once that’s done you’re plonked into a forest, and can follow the path to help Bogdan the trader fix his caravan’s wheel. After doing this, I came across a pretty jarring issue; when talking to Bogdan, the camera decided it would be wise to show the conversation from inside the cart, completely obfuscating my vision and making it unable to be moved. As he spoke about his weird familiar, I couldn’t help but nod along, completely unable to see what he was talking about.
All good though, our hardships make us stronger. Continuing into the village, I was given a bunch of small jobs to get the citizens to tell me where the old woman at the edge of the village was. Finding a goat, helping collect the harvest crops, even finding missing villagers. These are all pretty standard fare, and help you learn a few things before moving on to meet Baba Jaga (or Yaga, if you’d prefer). She will teach you a little bit of magic to allow her house to get moving again. I really enjoyed the magic system, honestly. It felt ritualistic and ancient, which many games handwave away. Once this is done, it seems like the house doesn’t respond to Baba Jaga’s command, and instead listens to you. She takes you under her wing (not literally, I mean the witch not the chicken) and you both sit in the house as it walks off on chicken legs.
The second area gives a bit more life to things as you’re introduced to new creatures from Slavic folklore, like the Leshy. I was always under the impression that he was a big old dude, forgetting that he could shapeshift and did this with abandon. Still, it’s nice to see these figures show up not as a malevolent presence but instead as a protector of sorts. Ancient sentinels of the forest and the old ways, at the risk of slowly getting forgotten as people move forward with their lives and things like technology take over. Honestly, meeting spirits like this made me a little melancholy that many of these ancient stories will be left behind, as will the lessons and culture they bring.
The entire game is very much based around that ‘cozy’ feel which is being bandied about a lot in the industry at the moment. Every action you do, everything you find is in service of decorating the house. I found these mechanics to be a bit irritating, having to finagle the pieces into place and having them oddly not quite line up properly even though walls are gridded. Still, when it worked the housing mechanic was a pretty cool, akin to how launching crows at things to collect them was a good time.
Here’s the rub though, and this is something I feel about Early Access games with regularity. It’s a coin flip. Sometimes I play an Early Access game and think “wow, this is so much content”, and sometimes I play and see that there’s just not a lot after the initial hook. At the moment, Reka falls into the latter. After about 2 hours of play, I couldn’t help but think that I’d kind of seen everything the game had to offer, even though areas are procedurally generated if you’re not decorating your house then there’s little else to do. That’s fine for games that allow tonnes and tonnes of customisation, but I just don’t quite see that here.
Optimisation is also pretty rough. The game chewed through my graphics card like it was nothing, but the developers state they’re working on this. Again, Early Access, known quanitity, yada yada yada. Tragically, I found one bug quite late and it completely soured my experience; the game has no autosave. After after three hours with the game, I was trapped in conversation with someone across the map, and had to option to leave or quit the game. I alt-F4’d, thinking I’d come back into my game and lose a bit of progress, but nope! No autosave at all, so I lost all that progress. This was incredibly irritating.
Reka feels very light on. The atmosphere is nice, the music is good and decorating a house will keep you busy for a while, but the game desperately needs more content and an autosave to keep you coming back. I’m not convinced the game is currently worth what’s being offered, but as usual, Early Access so there’s plenty of time for that to change.
Reka was played on PC. Thanks to the publishers for supplying code for coverage.
