Embr Is The Most Fun Co-Op Game I’ve Played In Years

I’ve played a lot of great co-op games over the last couple of years. A Way Out left a lasting impression despite the cheese, Cuphead rewarded attrition with more enjoyable pain, and Sea of Thieves provided some brilliant moments before the routine set in. But I don’t think any of those have been as outright fun as Muse Games’ Embr has been over the last week.

Published by Curve Digital, Embr is a deeply farcical game that takes aim at the likes of Uber Eats with the fire service now being contracted out to totally unqualified citizens. Bringing to mind the likes of Human Fall Flat (though, luckily, with the nonsensical physics turned right down) in terms of tone, your job is to save people from burning buildings, one silly rescue at a time.

Embr begins fairly simply with you just having to extinguish fires, pick up and then carry (or, far more effectively, yeet) people to safety. It’s not long before electricity and toxic clouds enter the mix, ratcheting up the chaos and creating a need for actual teamwork.

Upon entering a burning building, bringing up your special viewfinder will let you know where are all the citizens are, whether that’s taking a big dump or chilling in a closet. Your hose is the go-to, it extinguishing flames and carving a path forward for you. If there’s electricity on the floor, though, your hose will fry you, meaning that you have to figure out how to flip the switch while taking as little damage as possible.

Though Embr is largely just slapstick fun, it does actually ask some co-ordination between you and your partner(s) to save people in time. You’re able to customise your loadout with items like ladders to reach higher floors quicker, or the trampoline to perform a safe yeet from the very top of a building, all while keeping in contact with your partner to make sure you’re prioritising the right things.

I played Embr solo and also with Will, a fellow Vulture. While playing single-player is by no means boring, sharing the nonsense with another is where the game really shines. We watched in horror as a poor sap flew off the top off a building and turned into a skeleton perhaps one too many times, but Embr really is great at making you work in tandem. For instance, you get a ladder each, but if you’ve already used yours and need to cross a gap, you can call on your co-op partner to come help you out with their own.

To be clear, Embr is not exactly a tough game, but if you want the maximum amount of “flames”, you will need to save every Flappy Bird addict you can. Your success is evaluated with a flame rating; the more people you save, the higher your flames out of a potential 6 and the more money you can make. Embr has a decent selection of levels, each with their own spin-off missions with different objectives that will keep you coming back. We replayed some levels quite often, not only to experience everything they had to offer, but also because we were after perfection.

You are given cash for completing missions successfully, which you can then use to buy extra gear and even upgrade your tools — I was pleasantly surprised by just how much you have to work towards despite it being an Early Access build. Buying different clothing gives you different buffs, and you can upgrade things like your axe to make chopping down doors that much more effective. I was really feeling a sense of progression over the course of my time with Embr, me hopping around and scaling ladders like a roided up Naked Snake after a couple of hours.

Embr also, rather unexpectedly, features boss battles and escape rooms. The latter appears the most often, you being trapped in a building by a rival company with you then having to work out fairly simple puzzles to escape. The rival is Hosr, a Canadian company with a spokesperson who speaks in a weird Irish-Canadian accent — it sounds like Muse Games just chucked the worst impressionist in the office in front of a mic. The boss battle with this confusingly accented man is very straightforward, though we think it may have bugged out as there seemed to be no way to exit after beating him.

It’s hard to really ding Embr for much, it being an Early Access game with plenty of content and an irresistibly dumb charm. That said, it is beyond weird that there isn’t the option to simply restart a level. Instead, you have to abandon the job, return to the lobby, and then start the process all over again — something that really begins to grate when you’re looking for the best scores. It’s likely just an oversight that will be addressed early on into the game’s life, though.

Despite small quibbles, Embr was the most unabashed fun I’ve had while playing a co-op game in quite some time. If it’s pure escapism with some pals you want during all “this”, Embr could be perfect.

Two Steam keys were provided by PR for the purposes of this preview