Doom Turtle is a small independent studio, and Ember Knights is their action roguelite built around fast, timing-dependent combat playable solo or with up to three friends in co-op. It released on July 18, 2023, casting players as the Ember Knights, legendary warriors attempting to pursue the mad sorcerer Praxis across four Prime Worlds and restore life to the Ember Tree he has drained.
Each run moves through procedurally arranged combat rooms where positioning, dodging, and attack timing matter more than button-mashing. Landing chained strikes and well-timed swings triggers fiery attacks, and enemies—more than sixty types including beasts, specters, mechanized amphibians, and spellcasters—each carry distinct attack patterns that demand adaptation. Beyond standard enemies, Elites and Champions serve as tougher mid-run threats, and major bosses including the Royal Phalanx and the Plague Bringer represent the run’s real tests of a built-up loadout.
The build system is the game’s primary source of variety. Seven weapons are available, each with nine possible modifications, alongside twenty skills and over one hundred relics. Relics interact with skills and weapon choices to create emergent synergies—a scythe that spreads fire plays very differently from a poison-based archer build that incorporates summons. In multiplayer, players can deliberately coordinate their individual builds to establish cross-player combos, making co-op a meaningfully different experience rather than simply the same run with more participants. Between runs, players invest in upgrading the Ember Tree, providing incremental improvements that persist across deaths.
Doom Turtle kept a steady update cadence after launch. A free update added the Daily Dungeon, Boss Rush, and Chaos Run modes alongside two cosmetic companions. The first major paid expansion, Wrath of the Architect, arrived in October 2024, and an open beta in early 2025 tested changes to the Architect boss fight before the Architect Unleashed update shipped in April 2025. The game also reached PlayStation and Xbox in October 2025. A collaboration with Astral Ascent brought the Ember Cat to the roster in late 2024, itself later celebrated with a physical Steward plushie through Makeship.
The Chaos Run mode, which sits alongside the standard run structure and Boss Rush as a distinct way to engage with the game’s combat systems, offers a compressed and deliberately unpredictable format that tests how well a player can adapt builds under pressure.
