Yes, it’s mechanically understandable since being able to fly over all terrain to each objective would have really limited Lost Ember’s experience, but the developers should have thought of that. When I see birds taking flight and freewheeling around, to take control of one only to discover that they’re really restricted to a single altitude and glide is sad. There was also some truly astounding limitations placed on these other animals that was nothing short of immersion breaking. These puzzles are signposted and clear, and while the various animals in Lost Ember are adorable (some of which even have action buttons for useless activities, like sleeping or munching on some food), not nearly enough is done with them as a mechanic to make me want to spend any more time with them than was necessary, before turning myself back into the wolf for the other 99 per cent of the experience. While the world of Lost Ember is expansive, it’s also very empty, and what puzzles there are don’t involve doing much more than teleporting the wolf’s spirit into a bird, fish, or wombat so they can fly, swim, or crawl into spaces that the wolf can’t access himself.

Sadly, as the most significant human voice in the entire experience, and such a present one at that, this fairy character really needed to be the emotional grounding and resonance as the storyteller… and I found him more irritating than Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As a guide through this kind of purgatory, however, the British fairy delivers a supremely unfit performance, and I was left with the impression that the developers simply grabbed him because that’s all they could find (and it was no surprise to me whatsoever to find that this is his one and only voice credit on IMDB). As the wolf explores he comes across these puffs of smoke, and after howling a little before them, summons up a little scene that slowly explains the tale of how the wolf spirit ended up as a wolf spirit. I think the voice actor was aiming for a performance somewhere between David Attenborough’s wildlife lectures and something akin to Virgil touring Dante through the layers of hell. Helping to guide the wolf across the various different wildlands is a fairy spirit with a weirdly British accent, and herein lies the first issue with Lost Ember. For all its set up, in execution it’s a simple story of the soul, morality (the wolf isn’t in heaven because, we’re told, of acts he did while alive as a human), and the interactions between humanity and the world around them. It offers an animistic spirituality, with the wolf ultimately desiring to take his place in the heavens, though the game sidesteps specifically name dropping any particular religion and instead offers a concept of heaven that applies almost universally. It’s a riff on the concept of the spirit animal, only in this instance the spirit animal is the one being guided. This set-up, simple as it is, is a play on a wide range of storytelling traditions. In Lost Ember, you play as a wolf, who needs to explore a world that is now completely absent of humans, and piece together the story of why all that is left of that society is ruins. Combined, those are difficult issues to move past. Sadly it ends up being very shallow, and clearly constrained by budget and, perhaps, the experience of the developers. It’s a game of exploration and discovery, and it is truly magnificent in its art direction. It’s a beautiful and heartfelt project that weaves together concepts of ancestry and memory, nature and preservation, and does so in a completely non-violent manner. Damn it, I so badly wanted to love Lost Ember.

Lost ember