Elementallis comes from AnKae Games and Top Hat Studios. Some old-school, action-adventure action that seems to be challenging one very specific and very famous, 8-bit classic. Can you guess which one?

“Top-down action-adventure with elemental magic gameplay. Guided by guilt, you embark on a journey to restore the elements in a dying world. Harness and master elemental powers to fight enemies, solve puzzles, and explore a vast world filled with ancient temples.”

Let’s address the obvious upfront: Elementallis wears its inspiration on its sleeve. Visually, structurally, and mechanically, it echoes The Legend of Zelda so closely that the comparison is unavoidable. With that out of the way, the real question becomes: how does it play?

In its opening, the answer is encouraging. You create your own protagonist, name and gender, and are quickly introduced to the premise: your character becomes bound to the primal elements, setting you on a journey to restore balance as an “elementallis.” From there, the game unfolds in a familiar rhythm. You explore an open world, delve into themed temples, solve puzzles, defeat bosses, and earn new elemental abilities that unlock fresh regions of the map. Eight biomes, eight powers, a scattering of NPCs, secrets, and environmental quirks, it’s a clear, heartfelt homage to classic top‑down Zelda design.

Unfortunately, this is where the review becomes difficult, because I simply could not finish the game. Not due to difficulty, poor design, or lack of interest, but because Elementallis repeatedly and consistently hard‑reset my Xbox, dumping me back to the dashboard and erasing significant chunks of progress. The first crash occurred immediately after completing the first temple. I defeated the boss, approached the reward… and the game force‑closed. When I reloaded, the autosave had placed me almost back at the beginning of the adventure. I retraced my steps, cleared the temple again, and, after finally moving forward, encountered the exact same issue in the second temple.

This cycle repeated itself across multiple attempts. By the time I reached the fourth temple, I suspected a corrupted save file and started anew. That fresh save crashed before I even reached the first temple, when picking up the very first weapon (a stick you find in a forest) in the game. Another attempt failed to autosave at all, forcing me to restart from scratch yet again. Eventually, after yet another hard reset upon claiming the first temple’s reward, I had no choice but to stop playing.

And that’s the real tragedy here: Elementallis is, beneath the technical instability, a charming and lovingly crafted tribute to a beloved genre. The pixel art, the animations, the chime when you pick up an item, everything evokes the spirit of an unreleased late‑’80s Zelda title in the best possible way. It’s available now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, but I can only speak to the Xbox version in front of me. My console is stable, and no other game has exhibited this behaviour, so I cannot determine whether this is a platform‑wide issue or something specific to this Xbox release. What I can say is that, in its current state on Xbox, the game is effectively unplayable for me. I genuinely hope the developers can address these issues quickly, because there is a wonderful experience buried beneath the crashes. Should a patch arrive, I would be more than willing to return and give Elementallis the full review it deserves.