Last updated on November 30th, 2025 at 01:47 am
Empyrean – Roleplaying Game Review
Empyrean is a Roleplaying/Books/Adventure game from Choice of Games LLC, first launched in 1st December 2016.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 25+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Empyrean Stand Out
Overthrow your father's regime with his own secret experimental fighter plane! Dogfight dieselpunk aeros to save your city and the iron jungle beneath it.
"Empyrean" is an interactive "flying ace" novel by Kyle Marquis where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—325,000 words, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Far below the city of Actorius lies the mysterious world of the Deep Tech–creatures and plants both living and mechanical, and powered by unknown forces. Your father harvests the tech to create experimental airships, and the Revolution that fights his every move races to do the same. Your father's aero, the Empyrean, is governed by Deep Tech dynamics not even he understands.
Only you can fly the Empyrean, match wits against ruthless oligarchs and devious spies, and take to the sky to fight your city’s enemies. But who is the enemy? The Revolution, or the government they say is corrupt? Foreign invaders, or the Deep Tech itself?
In a world of gleaming towers and downtrodden laborers, streaking aeros and deadly rooftop duels, when you risk it all, the sky's the limit!
• Fly the Empyrean, the greatest aircraft ever designed
• Play as a man, a woman, or nonbinary; romance men or women.
• Explore the Deep Tech, a savage mechanical ecosystem below your city.
• Conceal your true identity from your family and the secret police.
• Befriend Wesh, a denizen of the Deep Tech who is both human and machine
• Cross swords in top secret research facilities, elegant cafés, and even atop airplanes in flight!
• Use the Deep Tech and your political authority to improve and protect your city
• Side with the revolution, the government, foreign powers, or the Deep Tech itself!
This Roleplaying game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Empyrean is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 27th June 2023
Recent improvements include:
Bug fixes. If you enjoy "Empyrean", please leave us a written review. It really helps!
Download & Availability
Empyrean is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We found the game to be quite fun. Though we agree with some of the others who wrote reviews. But mostly, we think this game really needs a sequel.
We really like the story and found it easy to get attached to the characters, very well written. Some of the mechanics didn't really make sense and sometimes it was hard to properly envision the setting, but all-in-all it was a great game.
We want to see all the endings but we're physically incapable of choosing not to hang out with Wesh. She's just amazing.
One of our favorite Choice of Games pieces – a rich setting, meaningful choices, fun characters, and a great deal of depth.
It was fun. We like the characters.
It's tragic that a game with such a good story and unique setting is ruined by awful stat designed. Seriously, for most of the choices in the game you have to guess which stat correlates with it, and the stats themselves are just confusing sometimes. Some choices we can't even tell which one is reaction or vigor, or which one correlates with finesse and not vigor. It honestly ruins the game when we make every single decision incorrectly because we don't even understand what stats are being used. Besides this, this game is great.
Beautifully written characters and plot. Wordy, but exciting. Definitely one you'll want to play over again. The stats are kind of difficult to understand? We still can't figure out exactly what will affect them.
Not going to lie; we were nervous spending so much money for one COG and risking hating it. But we took the risk and it was worth it. The story took us half a day reading through it all to get through it. Even on replays it takes us an hour or two from start to finish. The story itself was enjoyable and we found ourselves taking pleasure in getting to understand all the characters. (our personal fav is Amro, whose cheeks we just want to pinch!) It does get slightly confusing when your given the options to save building A or B and you can't remember what the two are. The stats confused us by their titles- we didn't get how they were matched up or how what you did would effect what. Made no sense to us. (After a few play through we got some of it figured out but we hate how long it took us.) we also struggled with imagining the world itself. There were details but then there wasn't at the same time. So we had to knock a star off for those reasons.
We loved the world building and story for Empyrean. The author did a great job of creating an interesting dieselpunk world and filling it with interesting characters and a dramatic political crisis narrative. Unfortunately, as far as CoG games go this one was disappointing. The stats were confusing given the choices offered during scenarios and we never really felt like we understood what our characters strengths and weaknesses were. In fact, we don't know if our character had any strengths because every choice we made seemed to backfire/go wrong and allow an NPC to save the day in our clumsy wake. As a result, when we should have been enjoying the story we were just getting annoyed at how little information we were being given to make good choices as our character failed every choice we made.
The game does not actually give you any real choices and you do not feel the eight of any choices you make. Ultimately you are forced to work alongside the revolution no matter what. The options for romance is so benign that there really isnt any. No matter what choice you make the story goes on regardless and you with it. It gives lots of names with no effort to actual have dialog with them. So your left with a strange informality with dozens of characters with as much character depth as a kiddy pool. Ultimately really disappointed and not worth the 6 bucks.
We loved this story and the characters. Must of played it thru 5 times, trying to get all the achievements. We do agree with everyone else, the stats are kinda messed up, and it can take a couple of tries to understand how each stat affects your choices. But after we understood them, we had no problems making the right ones. We do think it's really polished writing wise, and highly recommend it.
We thought we'd enjoy this one, but it really surpassed our expectations. The story was fascinating and original, and we loved the high degree of control you have over your character and your choices. We also love that there were several romance options because we'll be honest- as much as we love other aspects of gaming, it's the ability to form relationships like that that draws us to a game the most. That was well done here, and fit into the story without ever feeling forced. If we had any comment about something id like to see that it didn't have, it'd be the ability to reverse a choice you made that turned out wildly different than expected…but we realize part of the game is not knowing what will come from your choices. Still, we were always the person who read choose your own adventure books with about 50 bookmarks handy to go back to every choice so it'd be really cool if there was like, a "reversible choices" option you could turn on and off. Thanks so much for this game, guys; we had a blast.
We've played through the game about 5 or 6 times now. Love the characters, the setting, and the plot. Beautifully written, too.
Writing is good and the setting is nice. But the stats are dumb and their influence on choices rarely makes sense. As stats are diametrically opposed for reasons we don't fathom, Ive been forced to make choices based off of our best guess of what our stats are instead of proper roleplaying.
We played a fair bit of emperyean and really enjoyed the story. When we went to check on our stats's though we realized they never changed. We closed the app and went back on and it put us to the very beginning. Please fix it.
This had a ton of potential, but the stat system absolutely ruined it. The concept was great, we loved the setting, and writing was decent. The stats drove us crazy though. Rather than 10 independent stats, you had 5 polarized stats, and an increase in one demanded a decrease in another. For example, you couldn't be a strong leader and be cunning. If you made a strong leadership decision, you lost cunning points, because they share a spectrum (even though they are in no way related). This was infuriating at times, and really ruined parts of the game. If it gets adjusted, we'd gladly up our rating to 4-star. Try out Sabres of Infinity, Wise Use of Time, Zombie Exodus, or Mecha Ace, if you get s chance.
It would not safe when we're progress reading to the part where we're at we quit the app and close it and open back up again it take us to beginning it keep doing the same thing when we close the app it won't save please fix this.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.1.5
- Size: 27.60 MB
- iOS: 11.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity, Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes, Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Choice of Games LLC
Last updated: 27th June 2023 | Genre: Roleplaying, Books | Developer: Choice of Games LLC