Vex means frustrate
Apogee Entertainment has pulled back the veil on Emberheart Games’ open-world crafting adventure Vexlands alongside a trailer. It will debut on PC in early 2024.
Placed in a vacant world, your job is to literally carve out your place by crafting and selling resources to buy new tiles in the procedurally-created world map. Each tile has the possibility of introducing something helpful or harmful into your environment, making each one a gamble. Your goal is to strengthen your homestead while venturing out into five biomes to lift the curse that has befallen the land.
Without fail, a cash-centric approach to an adventure always reminds me of Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. I kind of doubt that Vexlands will center around the populace’s greed, but on the other hand, I hope so.
Honestly, the survival-crafting grounds have become well-stomped territory at this point, but Vexlands catches my eye for a few reasons. The first is that I absolutely love when an adventure has a cozy central base to unwind between adventures. That’s not uncommon for the genre, either. However, Emberheart Games handles development on Vexlands, who have previously done faithful remasters of Apogee classics like Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, and Monster Bash. It’s largely a solo developer headed by Primož Vovk, but they seem extremely passionate and hardworking with their projects, so I’ve had them earmarked since their release of Secret Agent.
That’s to say nothing of Apogee’s newest iteration, which is still helmed by founder Scott Miller. They seem really jazzed about their return as an indie publisher, and there’s a lot of charm in that optimism.
Vexlands only started development a few months ago, but Scott Miller estimates it’s about 25% done. As of writing, it will release only on PC.
