CohhCarnage Finally Plays Emberville's Prologue, and There's a Lot Going On

After years of talking about the game he helped to create, CohhCarnage recently got to play the prologue of the game Emberville, an action RPG from Cygnus Cross Game Studio. Now, just days later, the game has passed 600,000 wishlists ahead of its October Early Access launch.

This is a game that I, personally, have been excited about since Cohh teased the trailer for the voice actors. Yes. This game is fully voice acted and holy shit the cast is incredible. Matthew Mercer (Critical Role), Jennifer English (Baldur’s Gate 3), Amelia Tyler (Baldur’s Gate 3), Briana White (Aerith in FFVII Remake Series) and Ben Starr (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33) just to name a few. The voice actor list includes some streamers as well such as Cahla Thorman (Cahlaflour) and Lilypichu.

What exactly is Emberville you might be asking? Emberville is an action RPG that has combat and dungeon crawling combined with crafting, gathering, farming, town rebuilding, and some life-sim elements. Cohh’s stream focused much more heavily on the dungeon-crawling side of that equation, but the broader game is designed around both halves.

With Cohh’s playthrough of the prologue primarily focused on exploration and combat inside the Vitromotus, it definitely doesn’t show everything Emberville plans to offer. What it does give is a pretty good look at the systems players will be interacting with early on.

The first system that I want to touch on is a system that I’m actually super excited for personally: Weapon and Armor Masteries.

Weapon and Armor Masteries

Every weapon has a primary and a secondary attack and in order to progress with it, you have to actually use the weapon itself. Cohh explains that the weapon types level independently through repeated use. When you increase a weapon’s mastery, you unlock combos, passives, and other benefits. He specifically demonstrated a sword he was using gaining a Spinning Slash combo by inputting left click > left click > right click. He then later shows a bow unlocking a charged attack.

The team has a target of 16 weapon types for 1.0, each with its own animations and lines of progression. Early Access, meanwhile, will launch with just four weapon types, which Cohh clarifies at the end of his stream.

I’m definitely *not* going to be going gremlin mode and leveling each of the weapon masteries. Nope. It couldn’t be me.

Moving on to Armor Masteries, which is another cool bit from the stream; armor isn’t just light = less defense / heavy = more defense. When you develop mastery with armor something like medium armor can replace the normal dash with a faster, longer roll. Light armor can replace it with a short-range blink skill. Heavy armor turns it into a tackle and does damage to enemies when you charge them. That means armor definitely matters for you and what your playstyle will be.

Gathering and Crafting

Gathering and Crafting is also a part of Emberville and includes Alchemy, Armorsmithing, Carpentry, Cooking, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking, Tailoring, and Weaponsmithing. As demonstrated by Cohh, recipes can come from NPCs, books, quests, and leveling the crafting Mastery you’re focusing on. Importantly, crafting can be queued, and his description of the eventual estate loop is basically: queue your crafting > go adventuring in the Vitromotus > return later > collect what’s finished.

There’s also a system for recycling and disassembling items. This can be used to destroy unwanted loot and gain materials that you can then use for crafting. Items you craft can roll modifiers, and Cohh says creating ideal gear is intended to become important later in the game. This is particularly useful as it isn’t just promised functionality. He actually showed the recycler and crafting stations working in the build.

Character Progression

Emberville doesn’t seem to just push progression through a singular leveling system. Your character’s level, attributes, weapon and armor Masteries, crafting/gathering skills, and classes all develop independently. To me, this means there should be a lot of room for different playthroughs based on how someone chooses to progress their character, which is pretty awesome.

Class and inheritance

As he played the demo, Cohh unlocked Wanderer during the stream. He explained that classes operate completely independent from the player’s overall level. You can also switch classes as each class levels separately while actively equipped, and each has its own active skills, passives, and skill points. This brings us to something even more interesting with this: Skill Inheritance.

Skill Inheritance

Cohh demonstrated the Wanderer’s Swift Foot skill, which increases movement speed. Eventually, players will be able to unlock inheritance slots that can allow for a skill learned from Wanderer and use it on another class. So what’s intended isn’t you pick warrior you are now a warrior forever. No, it’s much better than that. It’s that you trained across many classes, inherited some of the skills you liked, and now you are Skullsmasher the Abominable and you will wreak havoc across Vitromotus. Customization goblins eat your hearts out!

A final note about classes as Cohh points out: some classes will have requirements involving weapon Masteries, armor proficiencies, or even other classes. It’s emphasised in the stream that only four classes will be available in Early Access, and that the goal for 1.0 is 15+ classes.

The World Itself

The world is planned around seed generation, akin to Terraria or Core Keeper. Cohh talked about the goal being to eventually separate the character from the world, allowing the player to take their character into another player’s world. Most of the map will be seed-generated, while important areas are handcrafted and integrated into that generated world.

Cohh also described the world map gradually revealing itself as you explore the Vitromotus, giving players an ever growing visual record of what they’ve discovered. And I want to stress that this is very clearly future development information, not necessarily that Early Access will have as day-one functionality.

The Spider Matriarch and Combat

The Spider Matriarch is the major boss for the prologue that Cohh played. There are eggs around the arena that hatch additional spiders. The Spider Matriarch is also not against eating her eggs to restore her own health, which forced Cohh to prioritize destroying them rather than simply face smashing the boss and hoping she dies before she heals.

Very unintentionally, Cohh had sold/recycled his best weapon just before the fight. Likely, this made the boss fight last a bit longer than intended. Not a bad thing really as viewers got a better look at the mechanics of the fight and combat.

Cohh does go on to talk about difficulty options during the boss fight, including settings that make the game easier, giving enemies less health, and he teases a hardcore-style mode that is planned for later.

In terms of other combat aspects, Cohh points out a particular enemy spell that requires multiple specific enemies to be alive together. If you kill one member of that group, they can’t use that coordinated ability. My takeaway on that is that enemy composition matters and isn’t merely just individual enemies always attacking. Spicy.

Choices Matter

Cohh takes time to stop and explain that Emberville is not a text-heavy adventure game and that when bigger conversations come up, the player should absolutely pay attention because some responses to villagers can have consequences. We love choices and how they affect the game and people hating you or liking you. I can’t wait to make everyone I hate also hate me!

Accessibility and QoL

Cohh made a big point of stressing that accessibility, ease-of-use, and quality of life were deliberate development goals. I’m not going to go super in depth with this, but I will give a bullet-pointed list of everything that was mentioned regarding this:

The following are either shown or discussed during Cohh’s playthrough of the build:

• customizable keybinds
• loot filters
• damage-number options
• health-bar options
• screen-shake toggle
• optional low-health audio cues
• planned controller support
• planned readability/accessibility font improvements
• automatic pickup behavior while gathering
• improved inventory sorting planned during Early Access
• plans to make many interface elements easier to read and operate

At the moment, the demo itself is only keyboard/mouse, but Cohh said that controller support is coming and that Steam Deck verification is planned.

What Early Access Will Actually Contain

Cohh took care to stress to viewers that they shouldn’t confuse the 1.0 vision with the Early Access launch in October.

The updated public demo arrives for Steam Next Fest on October 19, with early access launching October 27th. Cohh says that Early Access is planned to launch with:

• the prologue
• the first full biome and its boss
• quests and randomized events
• around 3–4 villagers
• 4 weapon types
• 4 classes
• an initial version of the buildable Estate

Cohh also repeatedly says that if this does not sound like enough content, then wait for 1.0. I will say it again: If this is not enough content for you to be satisfied, wait for 1.0. Early Access is something that’s meant for people who want to participate in Early Access development and help to make the game the best it possibly can be. Cohh spent several minutes on this during his stream so people understood what they are getting with Early Access. 

1.0’s target that Cohh talks about is this: 8 biomes, 20+ fully voiced villagers, 16 weapon types, 15+ classes, a full endgame, and much more, over an estimated 2 year development period.

My Thoughts

I’m going to be blunt here. I am a long time viewer of CohhCarnage. He is one of my favorite streamers and I have consistently used his content as a gauge of whether or not I’d enjoy a game. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t biased about this game, but what I can say is this: Watching this gameplay, I am even more invested now than before. Having seen the gameplay directly from the streamer who is my go to for seeing whether or not I would enjoy a game, I am confident that I want this game. I need this game.

I also want to highlight one thing Cohh said during his stream because it stood out to me as an example of how seriously he and the developers seem to be taking the responsibility that comes with Early Access. 

“You have to trust us. If you buy EA, you have to trust us that you are buying with a 10% discount and will one day get an amazing game. And every single one of those purchases is another promise to a different person. And we plan on taking that seriously.” — CohhCarnage, during his Emberville prologue stream.

I have not personally played Emberville obviously. This entire article is based on what I watched from Cohh’s playing of Emberville’s prologue. He spent two hours exploring a prologue he originally had budgeted an hour for. The sheer amount of customization that will be available in this game has me hooked. I cannot wait to try (and repeatedly fail) at making a busted as fuck character to just burn through bosses. Come on… Who doesn’t dream about just facemelting a boss eventually? Such a satisfying feeling!

Emberville’s demo releases October 19th, with Early Access following closely behind on October 27th! Be sure to check it out if you are good with a very much feature-incomplete game!