Become Baba Yaga’s apprentice in the upcoming video game Reka

Here is your chance to be a hag in the woods with your cats and cozy wandering home

Maybe us millennials cannot buy our own homes IRL, but in Reka you inherit the wandering, chicken-legged house of Baba Yaga so you can travel the world and improve your sorcery skills. While the game is still in development, the studio Emberstorm is already sharing tickets to the hype train by promising a cozy and magic experience for gamers who love to build and decorate houses (like in The Sims) as well as learn one thing or two about folklore and witchery (like in The Witcher).

Tinged by an autumnal atmosphere, Reka is not going to be your typical open world, combat-based game — like famous titles such as Skyrim. Chatting with Tobias Hermann, one of the developers of the game, I learned that Reka will be a much more atmospheric and narrative experience which will unravel the many influences of Slavic people in German culture by the end of the 19th century.

In Reka, you live the journey of a herbalist witch that travels Europe collecting magic and mundane ingredients scattered into forests, fields, and swamps. With these items, you will be able to brew medicine and potions that will help villagers or even spirits that are struggling to free themselves from the world of the living. “You get to travel to an infinite amount of procedurally generated areas, filled with hand crafted encounters where you can earn additional furniture and decoration for your home,” says Tobias.

Based in Berlin, the studio Emberstorm started the development of the game by talking to the local, eastern German slavs who still live in the Spreewald area. “We visited historical slavic sites, read books of slavic mythology and went to museums to gather unique reference material we can use, as well as build a strong foundation for the narrative and world of Reka,” adds the developer.

By the way, the name of the game comes from the word “rěka”, which means “river” in many slavic languages. It turns out that the Spree river also used to be called Rěka by slavs that lived in the region. “We liked the word/name a lot and chose to name both the character, as well as the game after it, since it is catchy, pretty and already sets the slavic tone,” says Tobias. “The rivers you encounter in Reka also used to be of bigger importance, which has changed for now, but the name remains.”

Designing Reka to be a female-fronted game was a deliberate choice made by the team. While the statistics are getting better, there are still more games that have male protagonists. However, as this research from Statista shows, increasingly more studios are offering character customization settings. This is also on Emberstorm’s roadmap: “We want to implement an option to customize your character and not force a female character on our players. Instead we want different body types to be available, which are not explicitly male or female.”

Such a rich level of detail is not found solely in the construction of the protagonist and world of Reka, but the music that guides the experience is also one of a kind. Tobias told me that the studio is working with “two very talented composers and sound designers” who are composing the music and finding talented musicians to record the tracks, even using instruments fitting the timeframe and region. And as it has been increasingly more usual, it’s very likely that Reka will have a special bundle for its soundtrack.

With no release date or price estimate, the game is (for the time being) PC-only. It will also be localized to English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese.

While offering an online mode is still not in the plans of this small-sized studio, Tobias does not discard this idea for the future: “We designed REKA in a way that allows us to seamlessly add more content like new encounters and furniture easily. If there is continuous interest in Reka and if we are able to support ourselves financially from it, we would love to get the chance to keep feeding the game with new content.”

For those who want to get started for the game, you can check Diana Wynne Jones’ book Howl’s Moving Castle and its anime version directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Tobias also mentioned the book series Discworld, by Terry Prachett, where you will meet the character Esmerelda Weatherwax. “Upon hearing that I started reading the books and they definitely inspired us”, says Tobias.

For now, the best way to support them is by adding the game to your wishlist on Steam and following Emberstorm on Twitter, where the team is always posting updates about the game and interacting with the community.

Disclaimer: This is the translation of an article originally published at Tilt UOL.

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