Ashen Review

By Steven Petite

Like a home away from home, Ashen feels both startlingly familiar and original. A44’s action-RPG wears its Dark Souls-inspired identity proudly, delivering nearly identical mechanics and progression systems along with a captivating open world and gorgeous art style. Those, combined with charmingly minimalistic two-player co-op, elevate Ashen to more than just a Dark Souls clone. Whether you’re tiptoeing through a shadowy dungeon, squaring off against a massive boss, or exploring off the main pathway, Ashen has enough of its own ideas to feel additive instead of derivative.

Ashen tells a standard but well-written story of a battle between light and darkness, elevated by solid voice acting. The eponymous god – a large, radiant bird – disappeared years ago, sending the world that it had kept whole into a bleak period of darkness. The heart of the story comes from the environments you explore, the people you meet, and their mixture of hope and despair as they await the return of the Ashen. As you begin to restore a normal semblance of life to this world, the beauty of what was once lost in darkness becomes even clearer. Though understated in its delivery, it’s a stirring and atmospheric tale.

Like so many games of this growing subgenre, its gameplay shamelessly borrows the major trappings of Dark Souls’ established and beloved combat. Not only is it weighty and methodical, but it uses the same controls for light and heavy attacks, and those, along with dodge rolls that keep your proverbial fat out of the literal fire, consume stamina from your meter. It relies on close-range combat with single-handed and two-handed weapons. Each decisive maneuver can be the difference between life and death – unless, of course, you drink from your Crimson Gourd, which is Ashen’s version of Estus Flask, to restore your health. And, naturally, when you die you lose all of your Scoria, Ashen’s take on Souls. Yes, if you return to the spot of your death before dying again you can retrieve your precious currency. Recall the relief of seeing a bonfire after a series of challenging fights in Dark Souls? Ashen has ritual stones, which are used for saving and fast-travel.

And yet, despite all of this crystal-clear inspiration, I never felt as if I was playing a shameless knockoff Dark Souls. Ashen peeks out of the shadows and spreads its wings by adding its own flavor. The main way it does this is with its open world and cartoonish art style, which are less about forcing you into dangerous corridors and more about welcoming you to marvel and explore its diverse and perilous environments. When you emerge into the newfound light for the first time you’re greeted by rocky terrain split up by patches of grass, trees, the soothing current of a calm river, and crumbling stone buildings. Much later, you stumble into a majestic, ancient city at the foot of a towering castle, shimmering beneath the sunlight. Ashen compelled me to explore not just to acquire new weapons and key items, but also to see all it has to offer.

The tussle between light and darkness is clearly reflected in the world design. Quests send you from those idyllic locations to a frigid snow-covered area beset with a thin fog that’s filled with oversized spider monstrosities waiting to claw out from beneath the surface. Spirits screech in the darkness of caves, beckoning you to inch closer to their calls only so they can jump on top of you and beat the life from your body. The dim glow from your lantern can help guide your way in caves and the few labyrinth-style dungeons that lead to boss fights, but these moments provide stark reminders that this world is at a crossroads.

Your progress through the 20-hour story is shown by your camp, Vagrant’s Rest, which grows from a makeshift grouping of tents into a bustling community with homes, buildings, and plenty of folks anxiously awaiting the return of the Ashen god. The NPCs you recruit open up crafting stations to strengthen your weapons, increase your Crimson Gourd, craft talismans for stat buffs, brew potions, and more. It always brought me joy to see a new addition to a building or a fresh face after returning from a quest.

Those NPCs also help you on your journey, because one NPC actively and capably fights alongside you by default. But they might be real people, too, as sometimes your companions will be replaced at ritual stones by other players. With a competent AI and no identifying markers, or voice chat, it’s not always clear which is which until they start behaving in unexpected ways.

On multiple occasions it was pretty clear that a human was in control, given away by the fact that they weren’t following my every move like a sidekick. We knew nothing about each other, but we still followed each others leads and worked as a cohesive team, dispensing of ax-wielding brutes and nimble bandits in tandem and promptly reviving the other when one fell. . The ambiguity of it makes keeping an eye on your companion rewarding. It’s a neat and subtle way to further instill Ashen’s pursuit for togetherness.

Though having a companion by your side every step of the way does make Ashen easier than Dark Souls, it’s by no means a breeze. In fact, enemy AI is diverse and punishing from the very beginning. Whether you’re fighting off giant ghoulish bandits or dancing around a pack of wolves, if you aren’t precise with your attacks and cautious in your movements to conserve stamina, all that Scoria you’ve accumulated can disappear rather quickly.

Staying alive requires a mix of light and heavy attacks. Though throwable spears exist, but they aren’t a realistic means of taking down hordes of enemies. Choosing between your single-handed or two-handed weapon depends on the scenario and enemies before you. Many of my most trying defeats were avenged by switching weapons and attack patterns. For instance, I kept dying in a battle against a group of wildly varying enemy types near the top of the palace because I’d been trying to take enemies out one by one. Finally, I switched to my ax and unleashed a charged heavy attack that knocked all of them off their feet at once, giving me enough time to finish off a couple of them before the rest could recover. Ashen is hard enough to make each victory satisfying, but deaths never feel unfair.

Nowhere is careful play required more than in the few dungeons that lead to boss fights. Darkened hallways with lurking enemies at every turn and haunted ice skeletons waiting to come to life force you to move slowly and pay close attention to your surroundings. More times than I’d care to admit, I made my way deep into a dungeon only to get reckless and unceremoniously perish, leaving a substantial pile of Scoria in a spot where retrieving it wasn’t a given. Enemies hound you, compiling devastating blows into swift combos. They dodge your inattentive slashes of the club and laborious swings of the ax with ease. Surviving until you recover your Scoria or see the glow of a ritual stone requires laser focus and a smart, well-executed strategy.

Although Ashen only contains five true boss fights across its 20 hours, each one is an epic and daunting task that emphasizes uncovering weaknesses. My personal favorite is Amiren, a colossal woman wielding a large staff and lantern who can render your attacks basically worthless and her deploy magic attacks over a huge portion of the room. At first, this fight seemed impossible – I thought it would take an hour or more to chip away at her health. I died multiple times before I realized her weakness and exploited it, leading to a highly satisfying victory.

Ashen also includes a couple features that let you up the difficulty, if you’re feeling cocky. You can equip a talisman that removes the need to play alongside a human or AI companion, for instance. Midway through the adventure, I unlocked Children of Sissna, a main menu option that allows you to start over from the beginning with less health and stamina, significantly raising the stakes. The Challenge difficulty level is currently wrecking me, but I want to build up Vagrant’s Rest once again – even if it takes me more than 20 hours this time.