REKA

The cozy game has become a genre with a house style, and that house style is exhausting. Muted pastels, a farm, a friendship meter, a merchant who says the same three lines for sixty hours. Berlin’s Emberstorm Entertainment has spent nearly two years in Early Access building something that shares the genre’s tempo but almost none of its furniture — and the difference starts with the fact that in REKA, the furniture walks.

You play Reka, an apprentice to Baba Jaga, learning witchcraft across a folkloric read on late-19th-century rural Eastern Europe: autumnal woodland, misty swamp, scattered farming villages that look like they were painted rather than modeled. The framing is Slavic, and — critically — it is not treated as set dressing. Baba Jaga is not a quirky mentor with a spooky hat. The through-line of the story is that your teacher is hiding something, and the game is honest enough to let that curdle. Rhianna Pratchett has the lead writing credit, and it shows in the quest texture: dialogue that trusts you to sit with ambiguity instead of resolving it into a fetch objective.

Published by Fireshine Games and Shochiku, REKA launched into Steam Early Access on September 12, 2024 at $19.99. It is PC and Steam exclusively — no console port, no mobile, none announced. The shape of the Early Access consensus is consistent: the concept and the craft draw wide praise, while the complaints cluster almost entirely on execution and volume. That is the good kind of split for a studio to be facing on the eve of launch. It means nobody is asking Emberstorm to change what REKA is. They’re asking it to finish being it.

• The walking hut: A living, chicken-legged cottage you summon and expand with a free-placement construction system — rooms, floors, furniture, curios, mementos. It travels with you rather than anchoring you to a plot of land, which quietly dissolves the fast-travel problem most base-builders never solve.
• Three-ingredient alchemy: Forage mundane and magical components, brew at the cauldron under a fixed three-slot structure. Legible in thirty seconds, which is the point — and also, eventually, the limit.
• Village reputation and questing: Trade goods and heal ailments to earn standing with villagers, who open up quest lines in return. Economy and narrative use the same currency, which is a smarter design than it sounds.
• Wildlife taming and witch customization: Befriend animal companions and build your own witch from a deep character creator, both of which serve the game’s real thesis — that a playthrough should look like yours.
• Procedurally varied wilderness: Explorable at your own pace, with no failure state pressing on your neck.

The gameplay loop

The core rhythm is forage → brew → trade → build, and Emberstorm has tuned the friction between those steps with real care. You wander out from the hut, pull herbs and reagents from a forest that actually rewards looking at it, return to the cauldron, convert raw material into potions and remedies, then spend those on villagers who need something — a sick child, a failing harvest, a curse nobody will name out loud. The reward is standing, and standing unlocks story.

What makes this work better than the genre average is that the loop terminates in expression rather than in numbers. In most crafting games, the payoff for a successful run is a tier-up: better tools, bigger backpack, faster gathering. In REKA, the payoff is frequently an object — a jar, a rug, a carved bird, a thing a grateful farmer pressed into your hands — and that object goes into the hut. The progression system and the decoration system are the same system. Walking through your own front door becomes a genuine narrative event, because every shelf is a receipt.

The hut as save file

The chicken-legged cottage is the design decision that earns REKA its place in the conversation. It solves a problem the genre has been quietly failing at for a decade: base-building games make you build a home and then punish you for leaving it. Stardew, Valheim, Grounded, all of them tax exploration with a return trip. REKA deletes the tax. Your workshop, your storage, your bed, and your entire accumulated identity get up on two enormous legs and follow you into the swamp.

The free-placement construction backing this up is deep and, importantly, not gridded into obedience. You add rooms and floors, you stack vertically, you place curios where they look right rather than where a snap point allows. The tooling is built to support absurd multi-story towers. This is the part of REKA that could carry a hundred hours.

Where it thins out

It has to carry a hundred hours, because the main story is short — a few hours of critical path. That is the central problem, and everything else follows from it. Once the narrative spine is finished, REKA has no third act — it has a sandbox, and a sandbox is only a destination if you brought your own reason to be there. Players who want to build will keep building. Players who came for Baba Jaga’s darker secrets will find the credits arriving before the mystery has fully paid off.

The world reinforces that thinness. Village layouts repeat and NPCs recycle, which is survivable in a short stretch and corrosive over a long session. Procedural variation gives the wilderness pleasant differences without giving it distinct places; you get new arrangements of forest, not new forests. And the three-ingredient crafting structure, so elegant at first, has a shallow ceiling by design — there is no combinatorial depth waiting behind it, no late-game recipe space that reframes what you’ve been doing.

Friction and interface

Then there’s the plumbing, and the plumbing is where REKA is weakest. There is no autosave. In a game built around long, unstructured, low-stakes exploration sessions — exactly the play pattern most likely to be interrupted by a closed laptop lid. That is not a rough edge; that’s a design decision that needs to be reversed.

The build has been prone to the worst kind of bugs: quest progression blocking outright, items that refuse to be picked up, NPCs clipping through geometry. In a game with a short critical path, a single hard-blocked quest doesn’t cost an inconvenience — it costs the game.

The UI is functional and inelegant. Map markers under-communicate, menus take more clicks than the information density justifies, and the forced slow walk near buildings is the kind of atmospheric flourish that reads as intentional the first time and as a leash the fifteenth. Cozy games earn their pace by letting you choose it. Taking away the choice to enforce a mood is form winning a fight it shouldn’t have picked.

The art direction is the least arguable thing here. REKA looks like an illustrated folk tale that learned to move — storybook composition, extraordinary lighting, autumn rendered with a specificity that suggests someone on the team has actually stood in a Central European forest in October. The swamps are uneasy. Villages have the low, heavy, weathered silhouette of buildings meant to survive winters. It is one of the best-looking games in its category, and the ambient sound design matches it: layered, unhurried, willing to sit in near-silence and let wind do the work.

Performance is the weak link. A 3D game with this lighting and draw distance is demanding, and the optimization work appears unfinished — the kind of shortfall that reads as a software problem rather than a spec problem. That’s the fixable kind, but “fixable” and “fixed” are different words.

Steam is the only platform, and there is no console or mobile release planned. That focus does the game one large favor: free-placement building is a mouse-native interaction, and REKA’s construction system is precise, fiddly, and rewarding in a way that would need serious rethinking on a thumbstick. Nobody has had to compromise the best feature for a controller.

The exclusivity cuts the other way on stability. PC is where players alt-tab, sleep the machine, and treat a cozy game as something running alongside a browser — and no autosave on PC is a worse decision than no autosave anywhere else. Combine that with the performance issues and you get the specific failure mode this design invites: an hour of pleasant foraging lost to a crash or a careless quit.

The 1.0 launch is the answer to two years of Early Access caveats. It should be judged as such.

REKA is the rare Early Access title where the ambitious part works and the ordinary part doesn’t. The chicken-legged cottage is not a gimmick — it’s a real reframing of what a home means in a game about wandering, and Emberstorm built it with the free-placement toolset it needed to matter. The art direction is superb. The writing is better than the genre requires. The praise it has earned is earned by the right things.

But a short story with recycled villages, no autosave, quest-blocking bugs, and shaky performance is not a 1.0 — it’s a very good foundation with a launch date attached. Everything wrong with REKA is the kind of thing that gets fixed, which is exactly why it’s frustrating that so much of it hasn’t been. The 1.0 build is the whole ballgame. If Emberstorm ships stability, an autosave, and meaningful post-story content, this becomes an easy recommendation and a genre standout. If it ships the Early Access experience with a version number change, REKA will be remembered as the game with the great house — and that’s a smaller legacy than the idea deserves.

We rate it a mixed recommendation: worth it only if the hut alone is enough. Otherwise, wishlist it and check back once the 1.0 patch has settled.