Games are made of moments, distinct sections that sustain themselves in our minds long after we put them down. Empyreal contains one of its strongest within its opening minutes, and I was immediately intrigued to investigate further.
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The action RPG is the debut title of the UK-based 12-person team Silent Games, a fact that grows more and more impressive the longer you spend with the game. Releasing forXbox,PlayStation, and PC, Empyreal cements itself as a strongindietitle from its opening minutes.
After a short intro, we’re dropped into a shockingly robust character creator, followed immediately by a background selector in order to fill in some of the past of our mercenary protagonist. With our initial skills and weapons selected, we spawn in the Expedition’s Hub and are encouraged to approach The Monolith, the towering construct that marks the game’s cover.
Upon finishing my initial playthrough, which clocked in at around 18 hours, I left Empyreal feeling torn—but I can confidently say that for a first release, Silent Games have made their priorities and their talent known.
Walk with me as we discuss what makes up the world and systems of Empyreal, and whether it’s the perfect action RPG you’ve been hunting for.
A Fascinating World That Sounds As Good As It Looks
Back to that moment we were discussing earlier. After a small walk around the Hub where you introduce yourself to the expedition team that requested your arrival, the player is pointed to The Monolith. As you cross the bridge to the tower’s base, a low hum overtakes the music, eventually drowning it out entirely.
We humans are small when compared to the grand scale of space, a theme Empyreal uses often.
The hum quickly morphs into a drone, growing louder and louder the closer you make it to The Monolith. Moments from the entrance, the drone rises into a deafening boom, like the tower’s presence is almost too much for your feeble human mind to handle. Then, just as the sound is crescendoing, you reach the door, and it suddenly cuts.
This moment, even after my hours with the game, persists in my mind as its strongest tone-setter. It brings to mind the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the moments during Destiny where the player is allowed close to some of the stranger entities filling the stars. We humans are small when compared to the grand scale of space, a theme Empyreal uses often.
As well as setting the narrative tone, this initial walk is a perfect opener for how strong the soundscape of Empyreal is. Each alien space sounds distinct while maintaining a perfect blend with the visuals. Each of Empyreal’s worlds, Quadrants as the game calls them, manages to feel and play uniquely, a feat only dampened by a lack of truly unique enemies among the first three.
On the topic of the enemies, most appear as glowing automatons that fit the overall artstyle, but quickly fall into a routine. You’ve seen this style of robotic guardian before, but their cohesion with the rest of Empyreal’s realistic futurism keeps them from feeling out of place.
It isn’t until the game’s fourth Quadrant that some seriously unique enemies get introduced that start throwing questions into the narrative with their design alone. There is plenty of strong enemy design in Empyreal, it just takes some time to get to it.
Gameplay And Gear
Empyreal’s gameplay is built around the game’s Quadrant system. Throughout the story, NPCs will give players four major Quadrants to explore, with an endgame fifth arriving later.
These Quadrants serve as the game’s levels. Levels revolve around fighting your way towards the Quadrant’s boss from room to room, with chests periodically dropping gear and alternate mixes of the Quadrants to play through. Clearing the main Quadrants and raising your gear level in the randomly mixed variants will lead to NPCs offering others to continue progressing the story.
Enemies come in groups and quickly overwhelm the player, forcing clever use of the various abilities and defensive options offered by your weapon class of choice.
Thanks to the plentiful random drops and the ability to seek specific loot pools from bosses in Quadrant reruns, your early inventory becomes that satisfying revolving door of gear like you’d find in Diablo or Borderlands before you land on a defining piece of equipment.
A Min-Maxer’s Dream
Empyreal put a major mechanical focus on character builds, offering three weapon types with dozens of equippable skills among them. Each weapon boasts a unique playstyle—The Glaive focuses on fast hits and rapid movement with its deflects and warp strikes, the Mace lets you hunker down with a shield and stun enemies, and the Cannon turns the game into athird-person shooter, letting you switch between ammo types based on the status of a fight.
Just as it sounds, each of these weapons play very differently, but all come from weapon drops that are refined once the player returns to the Hub’s blacksmith. Alongside weapons, enemies also drop specific stat boosts that allow you to modify or lock in the secondary stats of a weapon as you roll it.
Every piece of gear spawns with these secondary statsrandomlyselected, but by using the orbs dropped by enemies, a player can easily shift high-level drops to enable any specific build they want to go for.
Between raw damage, various elemental effects, and crowd control, Empyreal enables and encourages the player to experiment before finding the playstyle that works best for them. Once you know what you want, it only takes a few runs through the Quadrant variants that also drop from enemies to morph your gear into exactly what you need.
Asking Big Questions Just Beyond Our Grasp
In content and construction, Empyreal tries its best to be abiggame. While it’s the premiere title of an indie studio, Empyreal wants us to consider big questions, like our place in the universe, what we’re meant to be doing—the types of questions good sci-fi is built off of.
This extends to the mechanics themselves. While the game is entirely single-player, it boasts a number of “asynchronous multiplayer features” where players get to loosely interact with one another. Throughout your climb, you’ll find shades of fallen players you may offer your respawns to, a feature that seemingly offers nothing to the player in return.
Though the game boasts an engaging combat loop and the clear creative passion that makes good art, it stumbles between those big moments.
Similarly, after boss fights, a portal can open that you’re able to offer your gear to. If you do, you’ll lose a piece of gear as it’s sent off to another player, gaining massive stat boosts along the way for your good deeds and cooperation.
These selfless options in an otherwise single-player setting fondly reminded me ofNieR: Automata, another sci-fi story about life’s place in an uncaring world. Small moments that remind us that offering help for its own sake is what makes us human, even if you’ll never know the people you helped.
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When it comes to the game’s construction, it’s still clearly the studio’s first venture. Choppy animations and stuttering frame rates occur a little too often to be ignored, and while each character is well acted and offers shockingly fluid worldbuilding, only so much story can be told by static merchants.
A few character questlines do include moments where they move from their posts, and a challenging early duel with the expedition’s quartermaster is a welcome surprise, but most of your time spent with the cast will be at their designated stations where they expand on what you’ve accomplished inside The Monolith.
Closing Thoughts:
Empyreal is a solid action RPG with softrogue-likeelements that manages to swing above its weight where it counts, but still suffers from some noticeable jank. The game still plays well and offers plenty of replayability, including a secret ending only accessible in a New Game Plus run. At the end of the day, Empyreal is a solid first showing by Silent Games, a team who clearly knows what they want to create. If you live for games where you may maximize the strengths of your playstyle while minimizing the weaknesses, Empyreal is for you. I see a second climb in my near future. Here’s to hoping you’ll catch some of what I’ve left behind.
Reviewed on PC
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