Emberward Key Art
Image: Refic Games

It's not unusual for an indie game to mash together a half-dozen different concepts, but the ones that pull it off gracefully? They're a rare breed. Emberward by solo developer Refic Games has long been recognized as one of them, smashing together classic tower defense, roguelike deckbuilding, and Tetris-like block-spinning puzzle stuff since 2023. Better yet, it gets a second round in the spotlight this week, as it just left early access yesterday to a fresh round of praise.

I've briefly dabbled in Emberward, but never really dived in properly until this week. At first blush, it looks like a pretty standard tower defense game. Build a maze to keep enemies walking around long enough for your defensive structures to clear them out. But all the wall blocks you can place are Tetris-like blocks, drawn from a deck of cards, and all your turrets have different shapes and sizes, requiring you to construct enough wall foundation for them to stand on, and some requiring strange placements, like poison traps that hang over a lane between two walls.

See how it's all clicking together already? And then you've got the mission structure. In the game's basic Adventure mode, you pick a zone, then work through a Slay the Spire-like web of battles, each with a specific reward (new block types, new towers, new perks, etc.) to improve your bag of tricks. Complete all the battles in a zone, and you get a challenging boss stage. Beat that to unlock the next world. Simple as, though there are plenty of other modes, many unlockable characters (including one that lets you play it as an action game, piloting a heavily-armed spider mech), and even some roguelite-style meta-progression to provide permanent buffs.

There's just a huge amount on the game's bones, with updates having rolled in thick and fast for several years now. Today's release (full patch notes here) adds official localization into a swarm of languages, plus the fifth and final Adventure Mode zone–the Void Depths–with maps heavily skewed towards creative maze-building, giving you lots of open space but little room to build towers outside of your own foundations. Really, the only consistent gripe I've heard about the game is that the Normal difficulty mode can be a bit easy once you've figured out a few good tricks and go-to strategies. But there's higher difficulties for those who want a bit more bite.

As for what's next for Emberward? Well, for starters, the developer is going to rest for a while. The launch patch notes mention that they've been working 14-16 hour days for several months now and aren't feeling too great, which is extremely understandable. Beyond that, they're responding to bug reports, tuning up balance, and rolling out new towers, relics, and maps, although they admit that patches may take longer to come out as each has to be localized into eight other languages.

Emberward v1.0 is out now for £17/$20, with a 15% launch discount running until October 1st. There's also a demo if you want to see whether this particular genre mashup works for you.