Emberblood
A top-down, open-world action game you play in the browser. No install, no downloads.
Play it: https://playemberblood.com
The story
Every summer, on the shortest night of the year, the valley of Embermere hangs out paper lanterns, and nobody remembers why. In Emberhollow they are lit by Ash, who was born with horns, a tail and real fire. All he wants this year is to light three lanterns without setting anything else alight.
Then, in the middle of the festival, the North Gate swings open, and the old puppet show about the dragon on the mountain turns out to be more than a puppet show.
It is the start of a long way from home: over the rooftops of a city where every clock has stopped, into a winter that came in June, across the sea, and up a mountain that was not there the day before. And the whole time, back home, his mom keeps a light on.
What's in the game
- Five acts, five maps, and new powers and weapons along the way. Choices carry from act to act.
- The Case Book: every act has mysteries to solve. You find the clues yourself by looking, following tracks and asking around, then work out the answer in the Case Book in the Journal (press B). A wrong guess gives a hint, never a fail.
- Story Mode: a 14,000 × 11,000 valley with seven regions and seven bosses. Seven towns and hamlets with about 45 houses you can walk into, and a dozen of them have an upstairs, a cellar or a secret room behind a loose brick, a bookcase or a painting. Seven caves built as small puzzle dungeons: push-block plates, crystal switches, torch-order murals, timed braziers, dark rooms, mazes, locked doors with small keys and cracked walls that hide treasure rooms.
- Dungeons: big puzzle dungeons, each with a gift you earn halfway through and need for the rest, a weapon in a big chest, a boss key and a boss. What you learn in them opens up places all over the valley that you could only look at before.
- Weapons: the Ember Blade, Twin Fangs (fast daggers, sneak attacks), a Pike that skewers a whole line, a Forge Hammer that smashes guards and cracked walls, and more out in the world. Each one fights in its own way, and Mom forges every one of them stronger with star-iron.
- Skill tree and powers: a skill point every level (up to level 25), spent across four branches (Blade, Flame, Sky, Heart) of four rows each: whirlwind spins, hotter fire, quicker feet, tougher scales and an upgrade for every power. Powers are found, never bought, and the Powers page in the Skills screen shows how to use the ones you have.
- Companions: Pip the baby dragon, plus friends who follow you and fight, like Duchess the goat (head-butts) and Juniper the mapmaker. Villagers notice what you've done and say so, and they chat with each other.
- Side quests that play differently: chase down a purse thief, play hide and seek with the village kids, guard a pumpkin patch, race Elka through six flags, play back lost songs note by note, solve the case of the Mayor's missing pie (ask around, then accuse someone) and trade one wheel of cheese up into a piece of a fallen star.
- People to talk to: every named villager has a talk menu with chat, gifts, rumors and quest topics. How you answer (kind, brave or silly) changes how they feel about you, and friendship hearts open up new lines, discounts and favors.
- Choices matter: what you do along the way changes who helps you at the end and how the story remembers you.
- Quest journal: track up to three quests at once on screen, pick which one the compass follows, and read the full log of active and finished quests, the people you have met and the things you have found.
- Three save slots, each with its own chapter, playtime and level shown. Slots sync to the cloud when you're signed in.
- Music: a synthesized score that changes with the place and the moment (each town, the wilds, night, houses, the inn, caves and puzzle rooms, combat, bosses, the final fight), with little stingers for new quests, secrets and level-ups. Nothing is downloaded; it's all generated in the browser.
- Looks 3D: a toy diorama look in the style of the Link's Awakening remake. Every character (Ash, all the villagers, animals, enemies and bosses) is a little 3D toy figure that turns smoothly to face any direction, with walk cycles and a pose for every attack. Tilt-shift blur, trees and houses that lean with the camera, houses that hide whoever stands behind them, sun shadows that move through the day, and soft bloom. Settings has 3D depth (Off, Light, Full) and Characters (3D or Classic).
- More story: little adventures pop up while you explore (a wagon stuck in the mud, a kitten up a tree, falling stars, a ghost who lost his hat, a hungry mimic, a goat stampede, a frog choir and more), Tikka the runaway kobold baker has a story of her own across the chapters, and resting at a shrine or an inn can bring a dream from long ago.
- Simple words: Settings has Words: Full or Simple. Simple swaps the talks, quests, bubbles and messages for short versions in easy words for younger players.
- Never miss a line: messages stay up long enough to read and queue up instead of replacing each other, and the Log (a button on the dialogue box, the pause menu, or the Journal) keeps everything anyone said, every choice you picked and every message.
- Arena: endless waves in the Proving Grounds with every weapon, and a leaderboard. (Easy, Normal and Hard are the difficulty, picked on the title screen, for the story and the Arena alike.)
Controls
| Keyboard and mouse | |
|---|
| WASD / arrows | Move (Ash faces the way he walks) |
| Shift | Sprint |
| Left click / J / Enter | Attack with the current weapon (it locks onto a foe in front of you). With no foe near, it talks, opens and uses instead |
| Right click / K | Fire breath (also lights lanterns) |
| Space | Dodge roll |
| C | Jump (once Ash learns how) |
| X / Z / 1 to 6 | Next weapon / previous weapon / pick a weapon |
| G | Call your companion (twice: wait here) |
| U | Skills |
| Q | Dragon Roar |
| R | Healing draught |
| E | Talk, open, rest |
| M / Tab | Map and fast travel |
| I | Quest journal |
| T | Switch which tracked quest the compass follows |
| N | Mute or unmute |
| Esc / P | Pause and settings |
| L | In a conversation: open the Log |
Mouse aiming (Ash faces the pointer) is an option in Settings: Aim with the mouse. Settings also has Handed: Left, which mirrors the touch buttons, switches the controller to southpaw, and shows a keyboard set for a mouse in the left hand (arrow keys move; Enter attacks or talks, Right Shift sprints, Right Ctrl rolls, / jumps, ' breathes fire, . drinks, ; roars, [ and ] switch weapons). Tips can be closed with their X or turned off in Settings.
| Controller (PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo) | |
|---|
| Left stick | Move (push all the way to sprint, click to toggle sprint) |
| Right stick | Aim |
| Bottom button (A, ✕, B) | Jump (once Ash learns how) |
| Right button (B, ○, A) | Roll |
| Left button (X, □, Y) | Attack |
| Top button (Y, △, X) | Talk, open, use |
| RT / R2 and LT / L2 | Attack and fire breath |
| RB / R1 and LB / L1 | Next and previous weapon (both together: Roar) |
| D-pad | Up: drink. Down: call your companion. Left and right: switch the followed quest |
| Start / Menu | Pause (hold: Skills) |
| View / Select | Map (hold: Journal) |
Menus, dialogue and the skill tree all work with a controller too. On an Xbox the game runs in the Edge browser.
Touch controls appear automatically on phones and tablets. In Settings you can pick a two-thumb layout (stick on the left, a thumb arc of buttons on the right) or a one-handed layout for either hand, turn on auto-attack, and resize the buttons.
Accounts and cloud saves
Saves always live in your browser. If you make an account, your story also syncs to the cloud so you can pick it up on another device, and your Arena best goes on the leaderboard.
The backend is a tiny Cloudflare Worker with a D1 (SQLite) database. It fits in Cloudflare's free tier and, unlike some free databases, it doesn't pause or get deleted when nobody plays for a while. Passwords are hashed with PBKDF2-SHA256, sessions are random tokens stored only as hashes, and there's no email or personal info.
Project layout
game/src/ game code, split into modules (concatenated in order by build.mjs)
game/story/ the story as data: chapters, side quests, talk, clues and the world registry, act by act
game/*.html page markup and styles
tools/ the story checker, the story map, the world check and the old-text extractor
build.mjs builds docs/index.html (and runs the story checker first)
docs/ the published site (GitHub Pages serves this folder)
worker/ Cloudflare Worker API + D1 schema
Building
node build.mjs # uses game/config.json for the API address
API_BASE=http://127.0.0.1:8787 node build.mjs # point at a local worker
Then open docs/index.html, or serve the folder (npx serve docs).
The story lives in game/story/ as plain data that one engine (game/src/e10_story.js) runs. Every build checks it first and stops if the story and the world disagree: a place the story mentions that isn't on the map, a key that opens nothing, a step that can't be reached with the powers you have by then, a scene that runs too long. The report goes to dist/check.md.
node tools/check.mjs # the story check on its own (--act 2 for one act)
node tools/storymap.mjs # dist/storymap.html: every act as a graph of chapters, clues and choices
python3 tools/worldcheck.py # boots the game headless and checks every place and gate is really there
Running the backend yourself
cd worker
npm install
npx wrangler login
npx wrangler d1 create emberblood # copy the database_id into wrangler.toml
npx wrangler d1 execute emberblood --remote --file=schema.sql
npx wrangler deploy
A database made from an older schema.sql needs the migrations in worker/migrations/ once, in order (npx wrangler d1 execute emberblood --remote --file=migrations/0001_admin.sql).
Put the *.workers.dev URL it prints into game/config.json, rebuild, and push.
Admin page
docs/admin.html (on the live site at /emberblood/admin.html) is for the accounts named in ADMIN_USERS in wrangler.toml. It lists every account with its journeys, last save and Arena scores, and lets an admin view, download or replace a save (the old one is kept as a backup, and backups can be restored), set a new password, pause or turn an account back on, delete an account, and "view as" any account. A view session is look-only: the server accepts its saves and scores but never writes them, it never renews, and it ends after 12 hours. Use it in a private window, because the game in that window loads the viewed account's journeys. The live game uses https://emberblood-api.muellercodes.workers.dev. Allowed browser origins are set by ALLOWED_ORIGINS in wrangler.toml (localhost is always allowed for testing).
License
The story and the art of Emberblood (the world, characters, writing, and every visual design, including the code that draws it) are © 2026 Andrew Mueller, all rights reserved. The rest of the code (the engine, build script, tools and backend) is MIT licensed. See LICENSE for the details.
