Many kids dream of being a princess when they’re older. They want to live in a big, opulent castle with lots of servants and wear pretty, bright dresses. Many, but not all. I was the type of kid who preferred to fixate on the darker, weirder fairytales. I loved it when my dad told me horror stories of ghouls, monsters, and evil witches. Perhaps that’s why Reka appealed to me so much.
Instead of getting the usual princess happily ever after, you embrace your inner witch, decorating your chicken-legged house in whatever fashion you desire. Cosy or creepy, you decide. At Gamescom, I spoke with Emberstꦓorm Entertainment co-founders Julietta⭕ Grunewald and Tobias Herman.
Their studio is based in Berlin, and they began delving into local history and discovered Slavic people built Berlin while gathering inspiration, so they began learning about Sl꧟avic culture. Their research expanded into other areas, and they started looking at Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, and different culture’s folklore and stories.
“We wanted to do a house-building game,” Grunewald, who is also a concept artist and 3D artist for Reka, tells me. “And then we stum♓bled upon the tale of Baba Jaga, or the many tales, I should ♎say”. She describes these tales as “perfect” for a video game.
With that though, technical artist Herman says the hard work was just beginning. “We took a long time to test different things and find the one thing we love and 𝐆wanted to do,” he says. “In the end, that’s what Reka was. The idea is you play as꧙ a witch, and your chicken-legged house can walk around the countryside, discover new places, and walk around Slavic-inspired mythology. That is something we are deeply connected with.”
The team emphasises that Reka is not based on any specific culture or mythology. They were inspired by different cultur൩es, and soo Reka is an interpretation of various elements, like Baba Jaga, all thrown into a melting pot to exploreꦕ different ideas and themes.
“There are so many different tales because they are all localised for different areas,” Herman says. &ldq🤪uo;There’s no one way to see things, but there’s a lot of different ways of the same thing. For Baba Jaga, for exaꩵmple, sometimes she’s a very old, very ugly person with her nose sticking out of the chimney, and other weird things. But in other tales, she’s a beautiful woman who lures people.”
“Sometimes, she’s also a really nice Grandma,&rd☂quo; Grunewald adds. “There’s a lot of variety to the character of Baba Jaga, and we researched a 🌺lot of stories to create our Baba Jaga.”
Developing the game is only half the battle, though.𓂃 Grunewald tells me that marketing and getting peoܫple to know about Reka is even more challenging, especially as a small indie team. Not only do they need to spread the word about their game, but they need to market it in the right way.
Though Reka focuses on house building, there is much more to it. There is an intri🍌guing narrative, quirky characters to meet, and quests to complete. You can choose when to progress the story and when to just spend endless hours decorating your home.
“In essence, it’s a sandbox game,” Herman says. “You always have more to explore, always have places to visit and find new objects. You can continue building an꧙d change it up. The world is procedurally generated, it’s not one huꦦge open world. It’s important to know it’s a smaller area of around 500 square metres that you explore on foot, and you can also walk around with your house on chicken legs. Once you complete the area, you can walk to the edge of the world to move to the next procedurally generated area.”
When you think of other home bui𒉰lding games, they’re generally bright and cheerful, but the Reka team wanted to break the mould. “We wanted to create an atmosphere that was melancholy,” Grunewald says. “That’s something that really speaks to us. There are lots of games out there, cosy games, that are bright, playful, and happy, and that’s nice. But all of us like the darker aesthetic. We found that not a lot of games have done this before.”
The magic in the game is not a simple case of casting spells either, as they drew inspiration from their research. They looked at which herbs were used to cur⛎e things and how things were used, and you’ll find yourself having to prepare rituals and waiting for specific times of day to perform them.
&♛ldquo;For us, it’s important that the game could be a safe space,” Grunewald explains. “That’s the reason there are no combat mechani🌌cs. There are no survival mechanics. It focuses on atmospheric house building and enabling you to be as creative as possible, so when you come home from a stressful day, you can just relax in the world of Reka and explore nature.”
Player creativity is one of th🌟e main focuses, and there are hundreds of items to decorate your home with. Nothing is built on a grid, so you can stack books on top of one another and rotate items to create the perfect witchy cottage. Scrapping items to re▨build and redesign your home costs nothing and will return the resources to the house for re-use.
The area where you build your home is limited, but you can create a lot in the vertical space, cre🌊ating a winding witchy tower or higgledy-piggledy flights of stairs that go forever upwards. It’s quite an intuitive building system, too. You don’t have to find the right corner to build for your roof; the game will simply creatౠe a corner where two roof pieces meet. Your house becomes what you want it to be.
“The house is going to reflect what kind of witch you are,” Grunewaꦐld tells me. “You might like a cottage with a herbal witch aesthetic, so we made sure that there are lots of herbs you canꦏ hang in your house. There are many people who might like to be a darker witch, and they can add skulls and other mysterious dark objects.”
Player choice in quests can also affect which rewards you get, so if you make a good choice, you might get a light reward for yo🌠ur home, whereas if you choose something a bit mean, you might get a darker reward instead.
I already know that I will pour countless hours into Reka, creating my ideal little witchy getaway and strutting around the landscape on my chicken-legged house. I𝐆t’s set to launch in 2024 for PC and can be .