Winter Ember

I found Winter Ember a game that is soo close to being one that you could sink hours into. With a few tweaks to the annoying controls/movement and menus/progression this would vastly improve the gameplay. Making it more optimised for the current generation of consoles would make it shine even more.

Winter Ember is good, but could be better. The voice acting and script made me extremely disinteresting in the story, and combat is just so extremely dull. It doesn't help either when the soundtrack overheard in all areas of the game is equally as basic. These three things made the game lose a bit of its charm, but that's all mended together thankfully by the enjoyable stealth mechanics and moment-to-moment gameplay. As a pure stealth experience, this game fast became a highly enjoyable experience overall, and one that I'd recommend if you can get past its big issues.

Winter Ember is a game that really stirs my nostalgia. Being a fan of classic stealth games, I feel that we have here a tribute to one of the great pioneers of the genre. It's a game that stumbles a few times along the way, but it's worth it for the classic experience it provides.

Winter Ember is an ambitious isometric stealth-action that pays strong homage to its genre roots while holding its own entertaining identity, but fails to stick the landing on telling their story.

Despite a decent story and atmosphere, Winter Ember is a flawed experience that suffers from poor combat and even poorer voice acting and writing. Super fans of stealth games may find some joy here, but for most there are better stealth games out there.

Winter Ember is a dark isometric stealth game inspired by the Thief series. You can roam a gloomy Victorian city, occasionally break into a house, kill enemies, or trade on the black market while searching for secret paths and hidden corners. Unfortunately, the game also has quite a few shortcomings. Setting aside technical bugs, the main issue is the complete lack of any deeper purpose for civilian NPCs. The stealth mechanics—the core of the game—are designed quite well, and the overall gameplay is solid. The upside is that the developers have faced the heavy criticism head-on and have already confirmed changes and fixes. As it stands, the game is truly on a fine line between being recommended and not—at its core, it’s not a bad game, but it still has many shortcomings.

What on first glance I thought that Winter Ember can beat most indie stealth games out there, that thought evaporated soon because pretty quickly the game started to feel repetitive as it never introduces any new mechanics. Also while the levels themselves are cool they also have interesting design choices, where you just loop back to the same point like in metroidvania games. Normally this is okay if its an occurrence here or there, or if its essential to the mission, but after a while it feels off In other words, give it a pass.

It may have some technical issues that highlight the indie budget, but the good in Winter Ember outweighs the bad. It has all the stealth trappings; the frustration, the patience, as well as the stickiness of the combat, to harken back to the olden days. It may not be original, yet it doesn’t matter when it looks this nice and plays like the classics.

Winter Ember presents players with an engaging story and plenty of interesting levels to explore. While its combat can feel repetitive and the voice acting could be polished a lot further, overall the game offers some fun stealth mechanics that will be entertaining to fans of titles like Weird West, Desperados III, and Sherlock Holmes.

Although lacking refinement, Winter Ember is an adequate isometric stealth game that might spark joy for fans of the Thief franchise. With a more robust story, tidier stealth, and narrowed focus, Arthur might have given Garrett a run for his stolen loot.