Ember Island Review: Frustrating, Floaty, and Fundamentally Flawed

Screenshot: Ember Island

Every few months on social media, a post goes viral from an aspiring author boasting that they don’t read books. Their rationale is that ignoring the medium keeps their voice 'pure' and ensures total originality. They argue for the absolute virtue of a fresh perspective. What they fail to realize—and what professionals are always quick to point out—is that ignoring a medium’s history doesn't guarantee innovation.

It just guarantees you'll stumble blindly into every cliché, structural trap, and pacing error that experienced creators learned to sidestep years ago. Playing Ember Island feels a bit like reading one of those novels: you can see the unpolluted enthusiasm, but you are constantly tripping over easily preventable pratfalls in game design.

Ember Island is a side-scrolling, retro-inspired platformer. It bills itself as a “quarter-burner” and that’s no problem—I’m always up for a bit of retro. I play old and new games every day. But retro doesn’t always mean better.

Screenshot: Ember Island

I don’t want to be too hard on developer Calibus Creations. I’ll admit that I sometimes judge indie games on a bit of a curve. I’ll let things like production value go as long as the gameplay is good. Ember Island doesn't really have that going for it. There’s a lot of 'okay' there, but not much good, and nothing I could qualify as “great.” It doesn't just lack polish; it lacks a soul. It looks exactly like the uncanny video an LLM spits out when prompted to generate a "retro platformer"—all the recognizable shapes are there, but none of the structural logic.

Everything from the art to the gameplay itself is lacking in polish and fun. I do have to give some props for character and enemy design, but that’s where my praise ends.

Movement is floaty. Combat feels generally unsatisfying. Even the three different character classes don’t bring much to the table. They all three have the same damage output, with differences being stats like speed, health, and mana. And you’d think one of the melee classes would have a short attack that’s fast and a longer-range, slower attack, right?

Nope. In fact, according to the game’s stats, all three characters do the exact same damage. You can pick up mana and health items that push those pools higher than the character's starting stats, making those initial baseline numbers basically just “starter stats” and ultimately useless.

There’s really no other progression than 'go right, see what’s next.' Sometimes, when the game is good enough, fun enough, and satisfying enough to play, that’s plenty. But a game like Ember Island needs something else—or at the very least, more polish.

Not only is the combat not fun and the movement floaty, but the game is also frequently unfair. Sure, you can learn enemy placement, but having enemies drop literally on top of your character isn’t fun. Neither are instant-death moments. But it doesn't matter much. Even if you lose all three of your lives, there is an endless amount of continues.

This completely misunderstands the arcade economy. A true quarter-burner relies on tight, fun mechanics to keep you feeding the machine. Ember Island relies on cheap deaths and unlimited continues, removing any actual stakes.

Screenshot: Ember Island

The absolute worst part of the game is the sound effects. Especially as the mage, each time you attack you make a loud, ear-grating shout. There could have at least been some variation, or really anything else but what’s there.

There aren't really even any great enemy encounters. There are enemies that shoot and others that melee, but most tend to path around aimlessly, often bunching up into overlapping, frustrating damage hitboxes. If you get struck, you take damage and get flung backwards, which can lead to lots of instant deaths by falling into water or lava, especially if you lose patience because the enemy you’re waiting to move just won’t leave the ledge.

I don’t often find so little to like about a game, but Ember Island feels fundamentally uninspired. It’s exactly what happens when developers try to write the book without reading the genre’s history first, and it hurts my video game-loving heart to give it such a verdict.