Emberstorm Entertainment has a date for the full version of its witchcraft life sim: REKA leaves Early Access on October 26. The game first opened to players on September 12, 2024, so by the time 1.0 arrives it will have spent a little over two years in Early Access.
If you have never looked at it before, REKA is easiest to describe as a cozy building and exploration game wrapped in Slavic folklore. You play a self-created witch who studies under Baba Jaga, you raise your own hut on chicken legs, and you decide how you treat the people living in the world around you.
What you actually do in REKA
The developer sums the game up in four pillars:
- Create your own witch, with customization covering clothing, facial features such as eyebrows, face shape, eye size, hairstyles and skin color.
- Build the chicken-legged house of your dreams, with hundreds of decorative items to fill every room.
- Explore a semi-realistic, procedurally generated fantasy world of forests, swamps, villages, tameable animals and spirits.
- Choose whether to help or hinder the inhabitants of each settlement.
On top of that there is foraging in autumnal woodlands, cooking with the ingredients you gather, practicing witchcraft and quests that dig into the mysteries surrounding Baba Jaga herself.
A house that walks with you
The hut is the centerpiece. You put it together piece by piece and decide whether you want a modest single-story cottage or a multi-level mansion, and once the exterior is the way you like it, the interior stays editable at any time. Just like in the folklore it borrows from, the house travels with you on a giant pair of chicken legs, which tuck away out of sight whenever you set the hut down to rest.
Animals play into that domestic side too. Out in the wild you can tame critters you run into, and once they warm up to you they follow you on your travels and move in with you.
Cozy, but not entirely harmless
REKA leans darker than most games in the genre. Some quests come with a trigger warning before you start them because of the topics they tackle, and the procedurally generated world is built to match that tone. Your decisions matter in a smaller way as well: you can play a selfish witch or a kind one, which means the NPCs you meet in the various settlements can end up helped or doomed depending on how you handle them.
Reception so far and how to try it
Across the whole Early Access run, REKA has gathered 1,893 user reviews on Steam, 83% of which are positive, and recent reviews sit in mostly positive territory. Players have singled out the story, the use of folklore, the visuals and the housebuilding, while bugs and repetitive quest design are the most common complaints – the former being something the 1.0 patch is expected to address.
You do not have to wait for release day, either. Both a free demo and the Early Access version are available right now, so you can build a hut and meet a few villagers before the full launch lands.
Want to keep track of everything around the launch? We collect every new detail in our REKA coverage.
FAQ
The 1.0 version launches on October 26.
It entered Early Access on September 12, 2024, so the Early Access period lasted a little over two years.
Yes. A free demo and the Early Access build are both available already, so you can test character creation, building and the settlements right away.
You can play as a selfish or a kind witch and either help or doom the NPCs you meet in the game’s settlements, though the choices are not on the scale of a big branching RPG.
Of 1,893 Steam user reviews gathered during Early Access, 83% are positive, with recent reviews sitting in mostly positive territory.