Refuge of Embers

Refuge of Embers is a story-driven adult game featuring over 55,000 words of text and dozens of erotic H-scenes, promising a delightful gaming experience. In Refuge of Embers, players will embark on a wondrous adventure from a remote border village to the royal capital. Players will encounter numerous characters with diverse backgrounds, personalities, and motivations, uncovering their intentions in various events and building emotional bonds with them. These bonds and choices made during events will profoundly influence the plot and shape the destinies of both you and them. Refuge of Embers will be continuously updated with new characters, story events, and H-scenes, so stay tuned!

Features:

Captivating storyline: "Refuge of Embers" takes you on a thrilling adventure, following Biorn as he embarks on a journey filled with twists and turns, discovering a deeper purpose in a world undergoing transformation.

Inclusive community: Join Biorn and his friends in a remote frontier town, where you'll experience the camaraderie and friendship that will shape their reactions to the strange new world they encounter.

Immersive setting: Explore the edge of the known world, an impassable ring of dense forest teeming with deadly beasts. Prepare to be enthralled by the lush descriptions and vivid landscapes that will stimulate your imagination.

Enigmatic characters: Venture to the enormous capital city of Faruwine, where Biorn will cross paths with intriguing characters. Uncover their secrets, forge alliances, and navigate complex relationships in this mysterious new world.

Unveiling new depths: As the story unfolds, expect to witness personal growth, emotional depth, and profound revelations that will leave you eager for more.

Highlights:

Visual Novel Format: Engage in an immersive storytelling experience where player decisions shape the narrative direction, influencing character relationships and story outcomes.

Exploration and Discovery: Traverse diverse environments from a remote frontier village to the bustling capital city of Pyre, encountering unique characters and unraveling mysteries along the way.

Narrative-driven Gameplay: Experience a richly woven storyline with branching paths and meaningful choices that impact Harth's journey and the world around him.

Hand-Illustrated Art: Immerse yourself in a visually captivating world brought to life through detailed, hand-drawn artwork that enhances the storytelling and atmosphere.

Character Development: Meet a cast of compelling characters, each with their own personalities and backstories, contributing to the depth and realism of the narrative experience.

Changelog:

Version 0.22 is now out and ready for play testing. In this update we focused on overhauling our menu systems, GUI, and redesigning everything in a way that fixes support for controllers and handhelds like the Steam Deck. The Android experience has also been improved with a more polished interface with special made assets instead of just rescaled assets from the PC version. In the story we focused on expanding and refining Eryn's romance path, although the changes are part of a broader overhaul that isn't yet complete. The total play time has increased by about 10 minutes, but this includes major rewrites to existing scenes so a significant amount was removed. Like the last update, this version will require old persistent data to be deleted, so if you have weird bugs on Windows check in your appdata folder (C:Users[your username]AppDataRoamingRenPyRefugeOfEmbers) for old persistent data files that could be causing issues.

Based on user feedback we slimmed down the textbox and choice buttons in the redesign to increase the amount of screen real estate for artwork. The mobile version has the biggest difference by far since it was huge in our old GUI. In the past we also had an issue with dialogue and choice text sometimes extending outside of the text boxes on mobile. This was because the mobile font and text boxes weren't both the exact same percentage larger than the PC version. Now they're both the same, so if it looks good on PC it'll look larger but otherwise identical on mobile.

We also found a better approach for the quickmenu, which are the small buttons at the bottom of the screen. We ran a poll to see what buttons were used originally intending to slim down the list to only the most popular buttons, but we realized that was unnecessary and ultimately decided to turn the number of buttons into a menu option. Under video settings you can now toggle between the standard 5 button panel, a full 8 button panel, or just disable it entirely. There's a weird screen jitter when you change the setting for now, but we have a plan to fix this in a later update. We've also added a setting called film grain which adds a really subtle film grain effect. We were trying to go with an old anime kind of a look to really work well with the animations and we both think it really adds a lot of visual flair, but it's an expensive effect for performance so if you're on older or lower end hardware and suddenly the game is really choppy go ahead and turn that off.

The screens and logic are all working, but the sprite viewer has been temporarily removed and will be returning in the next update. We're also missing the new journal and achievements screens this time around but they'll both be making an appearance soon, likely in version 0.24 or 0.25.

Eryn's path is expanded in the prologue, but still very much incomplete. In the next update we'll be adding to her festival scene as well as a new animated h-scene with her on her romance path. A lot of the writing for her reworked festival scene is in and it's in the second to last draft, but there's a lot of artwork missing so we just reused what was in the game before as placeholders. We did manage to add in one of the new scenes minus the animation just before release, but it's incomplete and the final rendering for it will be in the next update.

Version 0.23 will be out much faster than this one was and will have a lot more story content, but 0.22 has a lot of necessary changes. Under the hood we've reworked a lot of the code for the screens and gui to get rid of as much tech debt as possible. There are still some remnants of the old screens and systems in there that need to be sorted out, but with the extra time we've spent this should be a mostly stable and bug free update. The story is still pretty cut up and scattered though, so that'll be in flux for a bit longer. I think you'll like the direction things are heading in with Eryn's path though. Send us a DM or drop a bug report on Discord if you find any typos or other issues.

Player Comments:

the artist has been improving a lot and they added animation to each CG which is awesome and i hope they intending to do that for all CG.the character has personality and depth. can't tell much about the story since it's still not very clear yet but it's interesting to say the least.i just hope they got better funding so the game could be done quicker, 5 years for 50 min of gameplay is a bit of a stretch but if they keep up with the same quality as the new CG in v0.22, i dont mind the wait.

This VN has the potential to be one of the best.the story is interesting, the art is good, the characters are hot. by all rights it should deserve a five star review.why four stars then?Simply put, for the time spent in development, there isn't allot here.updates are underwhelming.That said, the creator has been making this for four years, going on five, and is pulling less than minimum wage income for it. Really I consider the work an excellent demonstration of skill and ability to deliver. but it cant be output fast considering its likely being done as a side passion project.its a good proof of concept, and DEFINATELY worth a read through. but I don't expect much development progress until it sees better funding.Hypocritical for me to say so on a piracy site ofc, but there it is.

The charm of this game is off the roof. The art is very good and obviously the main selling point! The writing is really sweet and down to earth. Some may call it shit lmao but i like it. I really liked the relationship between the siblings, seemed very natural. this game obviously didnt need incest for itto be good so this is a bonus. I feel like this game deserves way more attention but the updates as others have said are wayyyyy to slow and shitty!

Conclusion:

Refuge of Embers is an emotionally illustrated game that combines a compelling storyline, exquisitedialoque, and a carefully crafted fantasy world. The journey out of the border town into the heart of thekingdom opens up countless opportunities for adventure and exploration. lf you want to experiencethe entire story in its entirety, Refuge of Embers will definitely be theperfect choice.