I love a good quest adventure game! If it includes unique characters and a really detailed and engaging setting, even better. So it was inevitable that I’d love the demo of Rekindled Tales.
The Backstory of Rekindled Tales
You play as a very interesting-looking creature in a fantastic world called Aurteris. You travel with an entity called “The Flame”, which lives in a lantern that you carry on your back. You owe a debt to the Flame, and unless you repay it, your soul will be the payment. You need to restore the townspeople’s faith in The Flame to rebuild Aurteris to its former glory and save your soul.
The World of Aurteris
Rekindled Tales has a magical, fantastical world, presented to me as an open-world 3D environment. The graphics in Rekindled Tales are superb. I felt like I was right there. There are waterfalls, bridges, woods, farms and many other features. The final game will have 9 towns for me to visit, and the demo lets me explore 2 of them. Many paths lead to interesting locations, NPCs and chests to open. While I am there, I can gather a wide range of resources.
The game begins with a nice tutorial. All of the mechanics are pretty easy and yet fun. In particular, Rekindled Trails has a fishing mechanic which is really easy, and I like that!! I also collected various plants and minerals. There is mining, but not in a cave, at least not in the tutorial. Instead, I played a real fun mini-game as I struck large boulders I’d find in my travels.
There were many, many ways to customize my character as I began the game. I chose to be a cat! I could also have chosen to be a fish or a goat. In addition, I can customize my clothes, hair, fur color and more. There are 4 save slots, meaning I can play many times as many different characters.
There’s a lovely soundtrack of soft, calm music accompanying the game, which sometimes includes a lovely humming vocal. There’s also great ambient sounds like the chickens clucking, the loud thud of heavy doors opening and a great realistic sound when clay pots get broken. And in one area, there is a blacksmith, and I can hear the clang of his tool on the metal getting louder as I get closer. Really neat!
The Game Play of Rekindled Trails
The game revolves around quests and side quests. There’s a nice journal which keeps track of these, as well as giving me information about the plants I collect.
In Rekindled Trails, I can sell the items I gather to a villager, and that has a really interesting twist to it. I must arrange my items in specific ways using a tile-based inventory system to make them fit in a puzzle box. The amount of money I collect is based on how I complete the puzzle.
First, I was offered a variety of boxes, and I chose which one to fill. Then I tried to put certain items in certain tiles within the box; some tiles cause sales prices to increase while others cause it to decrease. I can see that this puzzle will make it really fun and challenging to try and maximize my profits.
Some Particulars in Rekindled Trails
I carried a sack on my back to hold the items I found. That sack also utilized the tile-based inventory system, giving me a fun challenge. I could only carry the items that fit on the tiles, but I could rearrange and rotate them as I wanted. Sometimes I had to choose between two items since they both would not fit. In that case, I was able to feed an item to the Flame in the bottom left corner, which made it leave my sack. As in many other games, I will be able to make my sack larger as the game progresses by purchasing extra tiles.
I had some questions about the gameplay, so I reached out to the developers on Discord. They replied quickly and were very helpful. I point that out because I feel a development team that is responsive is a team that stands by their game and wants it to be the best it can be. I appreciate that.
There are groupings of clay pots all over the environment, and if I ran through them, they shattered, which is really fun!! They made a great sound when they shattered, too. But I wondered if there was more to it, so I reached out to the developer again and was told there is!!
I learned that the clay pots and the lanterns were giving me orbs, which made me run faster. Cool!! They are purposely placed in a way that helps me go faster, even in open spaces and off-road. Plus, sometimes they contain a little money!! Wow, so fun! Last, there are piles of leaves which I can run through, which also give me orbs. Plus, when I run through them, the leaves all go flying. I love all these little details. And even better, the plants, pots and maybe the leaf piles respawn!
Final Thoughts about Rekindled Trails
There is a day/night cycle in the game, but it’s not because I needed to sleep. Instead, it’s because some items change depending on whether it’s night or day. So I may have to sleep in order to get myself in the right time zone to harvest certain items. It costs money to sleep, so it will involve some planning ahead to do it strategically.
I love that I can constantly explore and don’t have an energy requirement; I can do what I want for as long as I want. I am able to sprint too, which I always appreciate! Slow walking games are just so … slow! The game features an auto-save function, something else I always appreciate! My character cannot fall off high platforms, yet another thing I love!! Rekindled Trails was developed by Kwick and is available for purchase on Steam. I played on a PC with a controller, and it worked perfectly.
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