If you grew up sinking weekends into The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or the Game Boy Color Zeldas, Elementallis is going to feel like coming home.
This top-down action-adventure from AnKae Games and publisher Top Hat Studios is a love letter to those classics, with a fresh elemental twist layered on top.
You play a young elementalist living with their guilt after their parents disrupted the eight elements and shattered the world. It’s now up to you to travel Elregir, conquer eight temples, and restore balance to a dying world.
The game can feel a little overwhelming at first if you’ve never played a 2D Zelda-style adventure. So here are the tips I wish I’d known before starting, organized to get you off to a strong start without spoiling anything important.
1. Don’t Rush, This Is a Classic Adventure at Heart
Elementallis isn’t built for sprinting to the credits. Every screen is loaded with secrets, breakable walls, suspicious gaps, and hidden paths, and the game expects you to poke around.
If you blast straight from temple to temple, you’ll miss heart pieces, mana shards, ore, and sidequests that make the rest of the game way smoother.
One nice modern touch worth mentioning: movement is fully analog and free-form, not locked to four or eight directions. It feels great, but it also means you can squeeze through narrow gaps the old games wouldn’t have allowed.
2. Get Comfortable With Sword and Shield Before Anything Else
You start the adventure with nothing but a tree branch, then quickly graduate to a proper sword and apprentice elementalist gear.
Combat is mapped to the basics: Y to attack, L to raise your shield, A to interact, and the left stick or D-Pad to move. Defending is just as important as attacking, especially against ranged enemies.
Get used to blocking projectiles, sidestepping melee swings, and timing your hits. The fancy elemental stuff comes later, but solid sword fundamentals carry you through the entire game.
3. Learn the Element Wheel and Casting Controls Early
Once you start picking up elements, you’ll need to switch between them constantly. Press R to open the element selection wheel, choose your element, then press ZR to cast.
Casting drains your mana bar, which doesn’t regenerate quickly in the early game.
Spend a few minutes practicing wheel-swapping in a safe area before you walk into a tough fight. Fumbling the wheel mid-combat is a fast way to eat damage.
4. Match the Right Element to Each Enemy
Enemies in Elementallis have elemental weaknesses, and the difference between using the right element and the wrong one is huge.
Throwing fire at a lava-trail snail isn’t going to do much, but hitting it with water absolutely will. Pay attention to enemy themes and colors for clues about what they’re vulnerable to.
If something feels like it’s taking forever to kill, swap elements. You’re probably wasting mana on a resistance.
5. Use Elements to Open Up the World
Elements aren’t just for combat. They’re the main way you solve puzzles and unlock new areas.
Thorny plants block paths until you burn them with fire. Big boulders need to be smashed. Some cliffs are unscalable until you can grow vines with the nature element, which is the second ability you unlock.
Nature has a fantastic offensive use too. Its plant attack siphons enemy health and restores yours, which is a lifesaver during long exploration runs.
6. Hunt Heart Container Pieces and Mana Shards Obsessively
Your max HP and mana don’t grow on their own. You boost them by collecting heart container pieces and mana shards scattered all over Elregir.
These are tucked behind side puzzles, hidden in optional rooms, sold by NPCs, and rewarded for completing small favors.
Grab every single one you spot. Late-game bosses hit hard, and an extra heart or two can be the difference between a clean win and a frustrating wipe.
7. Track Down Elementadium Ore in Every Region
One of the more easily missed collectibles is elementadium ore. There are 10 to find total, and they’re used for important upgrades.
Roughly one ore is hidden in each main region, with at least one extra in the fire area (Rogentia) and one you can simply purchase from a shop.
Some ore is locked behind abilities you don’t have yet. The fire region, for example, has a second ore in the upper left that you can only reach after you get the wind element. Make a mental note and come back later.
8. Smash Every Pot and Cut Every Bush
This is classic Zelda etiquette, and Elementallis fully respects it. Pots, bushes, and small rocks all drop loot, including coins, hearts, and mana refills.
You can also pick up pots with A and throw them to hit switches, knock down enemies, or break tougher objects.
It feels silly to walk into someone’s village and demolish their pottery, but the game absolutely expects it. Loot lives in pots. Always.
9. Talk to Every NPC and Find Xan Early
NPC dialogue is more than flavor text. Many characters point you toward sidequests, optional collectibles, or shortcuts you’d never find otherwise.
One you absolutely need to track down is Xan. He gives you the Bestiary, which logs every enemy you defeat, and he sells area maps for each major region.
Buy his maps as soon as you can afford them. Walking around blind is one of the fastest ways to waste time in this game.
10. Spend Coins on the Wallet, Potions, and Sewing Kits
Coins build up faster than you think, especially once you start clearing pots and bushes. Don’t hoard them, because your starting wallet caps out and any extra drops are wasted.
Priority purchases are a wallet upgrade for an extra 100 coins of capacity, small and large health potions for emergency healing, and sewing kits that expand your bag’s item capacity.
Always head into a temple fully potioned up. Bosses don’t pull punches, and a couple of large potions can save a tough run.
11. Fill the Bestiary by Defeating Enemies Repeatedly
The Bestiary isn’t just a checklist. Each enemy entry only fully unlocks once you’ve defeated that enemy type a certain number of times.
You’ll fight everything from oversized bats and slimes to lava-trail snails and aggressive wolves, and every kill chips away at your completion total.
If you’re going for 100%, don’t avoid fights. The repeat kills also keep your gold flowing for shop upgrades.
12. Backtrack Religiously After Every New Element
Elementallis is Metroidvania-adjacent in how it gates progress. Every new element opens up areas that were previously sealed off.
When you grab a new ability, take a half hour to revisit old regions. You’ll find heart pieces behind cliffs you couldn’t climb, ore behind cracked walls, and chests behind doors you never had a key for.
Try to mentally bookmark anything that looks suspicious as you explore. A weird gap in the trees or a single thorn bush in an empty area is almost always hiding something.
13. Don’t Sleep on the Map and Warpstones
The map is your best friend. Open it with the minus button and zoom with ZR to scope out your surroundings.
You’ll also find warpstones placed throughout the world that act as fast travel points once you discover them.
Activate every warpstone you come across, even if you don’t think you’ll use it. They become essential when you’re hunting down the last few collectibles late in the game.
14. Let the Story Breathe
The narrative is genuinely worth slowing down for. Your character is weighed down by guilt over what their parents did, and the journey to restore the elements doubles as a journey of self-forgiveness.
Pay attention to dialogue from Amalric (your father figure and your parents’ former master) and the Elementals you meet along the way. The writing leans introspective and quietly emotional, which is a lovely contrast to the cheerful pixel art.
Elementallis isn’t trying to be the next epic 100-hour RPG. It’s a tight, thoughtful, beautifully crafted adventure, and the slower you take it, the more it gives back.
Final Thoughts
Elementallis nails the feel of those classic top-down Zeldas while carving out enough of its own identity to stand on its own. Between the eight unique temples, eight biomes, and the satisfying loop of unlocking new elements, there’s a lot to dig into here.
Stick to the basics in your first few hours: explore every screen, smash every pot, talk to every NPC, and stay flexible with your elements.
Once those habits click, you’ll find yourself naturally chasing collectibles, sidequests, and Bestiary entries without even thinking about it.
Now grab your sword, find your elemental, and get out there. Elregir isn’t going to fix itself.
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Images in this article are from the Elementallis page on Steam and used under Fair Use.