REKA

My first hour with REKA felt like stepping into a painting that someone had left half-finished on purpose. The Berlin-based team at Emberstorm Entertainment have built something genuinely unusual here: a third-person exploration and base-building game rooted in Slavic mythology, with no combat, no survival pressure, and a mood that the developers themselves describe as 'Fernweh' - a German longing for distant places. That emotional design choice is intentional, and once it clicks, the whole game clicks with it. You play as a young witch apprenticed to Baba Jaga, the morally ambiguous forest legend of Eastern European folklore. The story, developed in collaboration with writer Rhianna Pratchett, does not spoon-feed you. Your relationship with Baba Jaga feels familial and strange all at once - she is clearly using you, yet there is something underneath that feels older and more protective than it first appears. Quests come from villagers, woodland spirits, and Baba Jaga herself, and the choices you make - help the village or protect the forest from it - carry genuine moral weight. The world spans forests, swamps, and small rural settlements, and every creature, herb, and structure name is drawn from actual Slavic folklore research. The haunting, classical score ties all of it together in a way that makes the trees feel like they remember something you have forgotten. The gameplay loop runs on foraging, potion brewing, cooking, ritual-casting, and building your iconic chicken-legged cottage piece by piece. The hut travels with you, which is quietly the best mechanic in the game - your home is never static, it is always part of the journey. Quest rewards come as new furniture blueprints and decorations rather than power upgrades, which perfectly matches the game's refusal to make urgency the point. Wildlife can be tamed and brought home. A travelling merchant named Bogdan handles buying and selling on a weighted-scale system that has its own small charm. The freeform building system offers real creative freedom for players comfortable with survival-game construction mechanics; those who are not will find the lack of premade structure templates genuinely frustrating, and a few early reviewers flagged the building controls as unresponsive at launch. The team has been pushing steady updates, and the Steam community sentiment has settled into solidly positive territory - but it launched with only its prologue and first chapter available, with the full story reserved for 1.0, which is still in development. That Early Access caveat matters. This is a small debut studio shipping their first game, and it shows in the rough edges: frame-rate drops in denser areas, quest objectives that can feel like basic fetch runs, and a content depth that some reviewers found thin after the first few hours. The character creator currently only supports female characters. None of that kills the experience, but it is honest context for what you are buying right now versus what it will become at full release. If you are the kind of player who wants a finished, dense game, wait. If you are the kind who wants to be somewhere strange and warm at the same time, foraging for honey and crow feathers while a haunted folk melody drifts through amber-colored trees, REKA already delivers that in a way few games ever quite manage.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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