What is Ember of Zandivar
Autumn 1937. Dr Mira Chandran has decoded a dead surveyor's maps and they point at five lost worlds — Zandivar, Atlantis, El Dorado, Babylon, Teotihuacan — each holding one relic of the star-heart. She travels with a whip, her wits and an empty field journal, and the journal is the part that matters.
Each world is one open map with no corridors to funnel you: a camp, a locked store, a dark gate, a cracked wall, a high shrine, a hangar and a summit, and hungry ground between them that swallows anyone crossing on foot. Every obstacle has exactly one answer and the answer is always an object — bronze key, lantern, rope, dynamite, fuel, propeller — lying somewhere you have already walked past. The field notes you pick up tell you where, in the elliptical way an old surveyor writes. The three stone rubbings tell you the order the sanctum wants. Read them, or spend the afternoon walking in circles.
How to play
- Move with WASD or the arrow keys and strike with Space, J or a click; Shift or K dodges, and the dodge makes you untouchable for its length. E interacts with everything — doors, items, vehicles, the ring lock. N opens the journal, which holds your objectives, every note you have found and the three rubbings. On a phone the left thumb drives a stick and three buttons on the right handle whip, dodge and interact.
- The order of a world is fixed and always the same shape. Search the camp and read the first note. Find the bronze key east and open the store, which holds the lantern and the rope. Take the lantern through the dark gate to the cart, which holds the dynamite and the fuel. Blow the cracked wall for the propeller. Use the rope to climb to the high shrine for the last rubbing. Fuel the bike or the boat to cross the hungry flats, fit the propeller, and at the sanctum set the three marks in the order the rubbings gave you — then bring down the Guardian and take the relic.
- Vehicles are not decoration. The hungry ground barely lets you move on foot; the bike crosses sand and the boat crosses water, and both need fuel before they will start. Mount and dismount with the interact key. The narrow passages are too tight for a vehicle, so you will be getting on and off constantly.
- Points come from everything: 25 to 120 for each creature put down, 60 for a gem, 100 for a field note, 250 for a rubbing, 150 for an item or an opened door, 400 for the ring lock, and on finishing a world 1500 plus 120 for each point of health still held plus up to 6000 for speed, which drops by 8 a second. Your camp is recorded as you go, so falling costs you the walk back, not the expedition.
Strategies that work
- Read the journal before you walk. Every note names the next obstacle and the object that answers it, and the game never puts an object anywhere you cannot already reach. Ninety per cent of being lost here is not having pressed N.
- The dodge costs nothing and makes you untouchable while it lasts. Against the sentinels and guardians — six and eight points of health, and slow — dodging through and striking from behind is far cheaper than trading blows head-on.
- Each rubbing you collect adds a point of whip damage, from two up to five. That means the three tablets are not just the combination for the door: they are most of your combat power, and a player who finds all three before the Guardian fights a very different fight from one who found none.
- The speed bonus is worth up to 6000 points and falls by 8 every second, so it is gone after about twelve minutes of a world. Early on it dwarfs everything else; late on it is nothing, and there is no reason to hurry into a room you have not looked at.
- The five worlds share their layout but not their difficulty: enemies get stronger and more numerous world by world, and the Guardian's health climbs from 80 to 140. Buy your knowledge cheap in Zandivar — the route you learn there is the route you will walk four more times.
A little history
The lost-world adventure is older than film. Rider Haggard sent Allan Quatermain after King Solomon's mines in 1885, Conan Doyle put dinosaurs on a South American plateau in 1912, and by the 1930s the pulp magazines had turned the shape into a formula: a scholar, a distant ruin, a local guide, and something at the centre that ought to have stayed buried. The five destinations here are the ones that formula kept returning to — Atlantis from Plato, El Dorado from the Spanish chroniclers, Babylon and Teotihuacan from real archaeology, and Zandivar, which is invented, standing in for all the maps that were never real. What the game keeps from the pulps is their structure rather than their swagger: obstacles that are locks, objects that are keys, and a notebook that is the only thing standing between an expedition and a very long walk.
Frequently asked questions
I am stuck. Where do I go?
Press N and read the objectives and the notes. The list is in order, and every entry names both the obstacle and the object that opens it. If an entry mentions an object you do not have, that object is in a place you have already been able to reach.
What do the three rubbings do?
Two things. They give you the order of the marks at the sanctum door, which cannot be guessed reliably. And each one you hold adds a point of whip damage, from two up to five — so collecting all three is also how you make the Guardian survivable.
Why can I barely move on the flats?
That is the hungry ground, and it is meant to stop you crossing on foot. Find the fuel, fuel the bike or the boat, and ride across. Dismount before the narrow passages — a vehicle will not fit through them.
Is there a daily challenge?
No, and deliberately so. The five maps are drawn by hand rather than generated, so a daily version would hand everyone the same world it hands them anyway, and a full expedition takes far longer than a daily challenge should. Your progress is saved, so it can be played across several sittings.
