In most Slavic fairy tales, Baba Yaga is the thing in the forest you run from: a witch in a hut on chicken legs who, depending on the telling, eats the children who wander too close. REKA, the debut game from Berlin studio Emberstorm Entertainment, makes her your teacher. You play Reka, her apprentice, and the house on chicken legs is yours to build, room by room, while it carries you through the autumn woods. After more than two years in Early Access, the full game is out, and the apprenticeship finally has an ending.

REKA 1.0 launched on Steam on October 26, 2026, for $19.99, and a 35 percent launch discount runs until November 7. It is a PC game only. Fireshine Games, the London publisher behind Core Keeper, released it with Japan’s Shochiku. The trailer above dates from June, when the launch was still set for August 18. Emberstorm then pushed the release to October to fix bugs and polish the game. REKA had been on sale in Early Access since September 12, 2024.

Baba Jaga trains you instead of hunting you

The game uses the Polish spelling, Baba Jaga, and its Steam page promises a story “steeped in authentic Slavic mythology”. Rhianna Pratchett, the writer of Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite, is the lead writer. You design your own Reka in a character creator and then learn the trade the old way. You forage for herbs, brew potions, cook traditional recipes and practice what the store page calls “quiet witchery”.

Your magic also changes the people around you. Villagers hand out quests, and the way Reka deals with them decides whether she becomes a help or a nuisance in their lives. Baba Jaga, for her part, keeps her own secrets, and the game’s own description calls them “harrowing”.

There is no fighting. Emberstorm sells REKA as a combat-free game about decorating, crafting, foraging and small quests, set in foggy forests, swamps and villages “where old spirits linger”. The danger stays in the mood. You can befriend cats, foxes and other forest animals and bring them home to live in the cottage, which keeps moving through a landscape that the developers describe as unpredictable and sometimes dark.

The walking cottage got the biggest upgrade

The house is the game’s centerpiece. It starts as a single wooden room and can grow into a multi-story home full of furniture, trinkets and clutter. For 1.0, Emberstorm added spruce, birch, beech and pine wood, clay, more furniture and decorations, and new materials for the outside of the house.

The building tools changed as well. You can now drag to place or delete many pieces at once instead of clicking them one by one. A rotation compass shows which way an object faces, pieces snap together more cleanly, and the roof tools handle more complicated shapes. The game also gained 21 Steam achievements, and each one unlocks a commemorative plaque you can hang inside the cottage.

The story ends, and the forest keeps going

The headline addition is the final chapter. Reka finishes her apprenticeship and gets ready to become a legendary witch in her own right. The full release also adds side quests, shrines, collectibles, new places to find and new animals. Once the story is over, you can keep foraging, decorating and taming creatures.

Many of the changes are small and visible. The wind effects are better, moths gather around lamps at night, Reka leaves footprints, water splashes, her breath shows in the cold, and her clothes soak through in the rain. Autosave protects progress during quests and building, you can now set how often it runs, and performance was tuned for big houses and for villages full of light sources. Japanese is new, and the game now runs in nine languages, including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Simplified Chinese.

Early Access players rated REKA “Very Positive” on Steam, according to its publisher, which puts it in good company in a crowded field of cozy building games. Few of them start from the scariest woman in Slavic folklore. Baba Yaga stories usually end with someone escaping her hut. REKA’s story ends with you staying in yours.

Tags: gaming, cozy games, Fireshine Games, Baba Yaga, Emberstorm Entertainment, REKA