Two indie games take very different routes to familiar ideas. Emberville mixes dungeon crawling, looting, and town management, while Blackwood: Act One turns a DVD store operator into a night-time action hero. One is preparing for early access; the other is already available with a six-hour opening act and a roadmap reaching 2027.
Emberville Builds a Dungeon Around a Town
Emberville is a top-down action RPG from Cygnus Cross, a studio co-owned by Twitch streamer Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassel. Its design combines the dungeon crawling and loot of Diablo with the life-sim systems associated with Stardew Valley—a familiar recipe, but one with plenty of room for the ingredients to fight each other.
The game opens with the player waking in a mysterious place: a large underground prison. The immediate goal is escape, but the longer objective is rebuilding a town, which gives the adventure a second structure beyond clearing areas and collecting equipment.
Combat lets players switch between a sword, bow, and fists. A combo system supports the fighting, and there is no stamina management, removing one of the genre’s most reliable methods for making every swing feel like an accounting error.
Outside combat, Emberville includes swappable classes, weapon and armor mastery, crafting, cooking, mining, farming, and base-building. Those systems point toward a game that wants to move between action RPG progression and routine settlement work without treating either side as a decorative extra.
Cygnus Cross is also giving the game a strong visual and vocal foundation. Emberville features lush pixel art and dense environments, with a voice cast that includes Amelia Tyler, Jennifer English, Abubakar Salim, Matt Mercer, and Ben Starr.
“It’s downright beautiful, for one thing. The lush pixel art and dense environments drew me in, while the animations look slick.” That combination of presentation and system-heavy design makes Emberville one to watch before it reaches Steam in early access on October 27.
Blackwood Puts a DVD Store Between Gunfights
Blackwood: Act One takes a stranger route to action. Set in 2012, it casts the player as someone who runs a DVD store by day and becomes an ersatz John Wick by night—a premise with enough contrast to carry the marketing before the first scene begins.
AttritoM7 Productions developed the game, while IZilla Games and AttritoM7 Productions published it. The first act is out now on Steam for Windows, with plans for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
The opening act offers around six hours of playtime and includes action sequences built around Max Payne-style Bullet Time. Acts two and three are also included, with both expected to arrive in 2027.
Blackwood: Act One usually costs $25, but a 10 percent discount runs until September 23. Its trailer arrived in October of the previous year, 2025, so the game has had time to establish its particular blend of retail nostalgia and cinematic violence.
The execution is less polished than the premise. Hand-to-hand combat feels clunky, the audio mix is poor, and the car handling creates another weak point. The DVD store sections are also less compelling than the equivalent aspect in Retro Rewind, which leaves the game’s most distinctive idea struggling to justify its place.
That does not erase the appeal of the setup, or the value of a six-hour first act for players willing to accept rough edges. It does mean Blackwood: Act One currently works better as an action experiment than as a convincing simulation of running a DVD store.
Together, these games show two versions of indie ambition. Emberville packs combat, survival, farming, crafting, and settlement building into one upcoming release, while Blackwood: Act One bets on the collision between ordinary retail work and stylized action. The ideas are not equally refined, but at least neither game is content to behave like another anonymous genre product.
