This starts off great. A nice little action rpg that feels like it blends Dark Souls and Zelda, having quite a chill atmosphere. The expansion of your little base camp is nice to watch as it grows every time you have someone back, or progress the game. It's really good seeing how things improve.

But then I hit a wall after a few hours. It started to feel like a real slog and a grind. With a dungeon that seems endless, and there's no spawn point/shrines or whatever, and it's fucking infuriating if you get killed in a cheap way, like getting knocked off a narrow platform, then having to go all the way to the beginning again. Nah, get fucked. At least Dark Souls had bonfires on runs that long.

Otherwise, it's a really nice game to play, and I enjoyed exploring the world with my pal, and kicking in bad guys, rescuing folk, expanding the base. All good things, let down by a crappy big dungeon that I can't beat.

And then I started playing a better, and I was done with this for the time being.

Really, really wanted to like this more than I did. l adore Soulslikes and Ashen does a great amount of this things really well, which makes its major failures all the more heartbreaking.

Other than it being absolutely gorgeous and feeling great to play, I genuinely adore how progression is handled. Not having the ability to level up and instead getting stat bonuses from exploration or doing sidequests is an insanely fresh take on character progression (in this genre at least), and I really like that an AI companion accompanies you the whole way through (other Soulslikes like Code Vein do this but a lot less successfully imo). It’s a shame, then, that the five bosses in the game range from mediocre to downright abysmal, and it’s even more saddening that most of them are on the lower end of the spectrum. Similarly, the level design is middling. The open areas are fine but the two labyrinthian dungeons in the game are an absolute slog to get through.

Still, I’d say I enjoyed my time with Ashen, and I’m hoping the team gives the IP another shot.

Played: April 2022

The promise of wayfaring out into a withered world and shepherding weary souls back to a village that's always expanding is what drew me to Ashen.

It's a concept I've loved in games like Dark Cloud 2 and Ys 8, and I enjoy it most when I don't have to do any of the base-building or resource management of growing that village. In this soulslike you simply find people out in the wilderness, and every time you return home to Vagrant's Rest after a new main or side quest, you'll find that a pile of rocks has become a scaffolding and eventually a whole new house. I get "dungeon anxiety" pretty easily -- it's part of the fun -- but the relief that comes with the safety of reaching a new town after a treacherous dungeon feels more profound when it's the warmth of a familiar home that has welcomed new life.

This is my third soulslike after Nioh and Sekiro (I haven't played an actual Dark Souls), and while it's much easier than both of those games, it's still harder than a typical action adventure or action RPG. Enemies lash out from any and all corners, and I spent every run learning the nuances of an area until my next inevitable death. This one lets you recharge your health at ritual stones (its bonfires) without having to reset the area, which makes it more approachable than other games in this genre. The world is both dour and lively, but every bit of life out there is marked for death by your hands unless they're a story character or trader. Two repeat character models (villager and trader) also find their way back to Vagrant's Rest without you having to explicitly recruit them. They make things much more lived-in than if it were just named characters, but they were a little too nondescript for my taste even with well-written flavor text. It's funny that the villager is also a common enemy type out in the world. As if the only thing separating them between blindly attacking you and sharing a roof with you is the village border. Home is a line of sanity, I guess.

Desaturated clay is a good look for Ashen. Much of the world is gray, true to its name, but much of it's also sun-kissed and golden red. Much more of it, still, is pitch black and requires a lantern to explore. The lack of details on the environmental textures and the lack of features on characters' faces invited me to appreciate the aesthetic more holistically. It's less about individual leaves in the wind and more about the collective people in a storm. I enjoyed how anonymous the player character is. You're made to go everywhere with a companion, but which one depends on the selected quest, and the emptiness of my own character led me to latch on more to these supporters. It also eased that dungeon anxiety to have a companion -- a piece of my safe haven -- with me at all times. They make the wilderness easier to overcome, both in combat and traversal. I'm pretty sure main story exploration outright requires a companion to progress, and while skilled players can defeat enemies in combat alone, a companion goes a long way. I don't have PlayStation Plus, so mine was never another player but an AI, to which I'd give a grade of B+. There were a couple of glitchy moments (I once lost, like, 60k of in-game currency to my companion being unable to revive me by getting stuck in a doorway), and they don't always fight strategically, but for the most part they do what they're supposed to. One of the boss fight strategies was to lure them towards me and just let my companion strike from behind the whole time. I still haven't decided if that was smart characterization for that particular boss or poor game design. Maybe it's one sacrificed for the other? It was at the end of a dungeon that was a total son of a bitch, so I didn't mind.

Admittedly, I didn't grab on to the central narrative or lore much. You're trying to revive some being of light called the Ashen that will guide this world from out of darkness. I think. Everything lives in the ruins of a once-great empire, which made for a pretty cool level design. I did generally latch on to most of the main and side characters. Peg-legged guy looking for his tools and eventually his younger sister. The woman hellbent on curing a disease that another main character has by sending you out to fight stronger and stranger creatures she can study. Another woman whose quests involve bringing back each of her five senses until she's whole again. A couple of godlike beings whose stature against your tiny character is breathtaking. What they lack in facial features is more than made up by height, color, shape, and costume design. Even the fact that swords aren't a thing in this world and you're stuck with variations of axes and clubs gives it a distinct primitive personality. While the combat is pretty basic with light and heavy attack combos and dodge rolls, individual weapons have such nuance to their playstyle, you could stick with early-game weapons the entire time if it suits you -- as long as you keep them leveled up via crafting. I do advise swapping out for newer shields, though.

All told, Ashen is pleasing to the eye, fairly short, and it understands that home is other people. Check it out!

I was there when they announced Ashen and I was intrigued.
I was there when it became an Epic Games Exclusive.
I was there when they released it on Steam at almost double the price you could get it on EGS, a year later.
And you know what? Not even at 6€ with a coupon on the latest EGS sale would this game still be worth your money.
At all.

Obviously, this game is not AAA, and I wasn't expecting perfection, but I was expecting a good video game. When I decided to buy the game I was aware the experience was around the 15h mark, and I was ok with it. Some games like Abzu, Inside, Journey, and Undertale are also made by small game studios and are even shorter, yet they manage to be consistent and most importantly, have well-thought-out ideas.

But what is Ashen?
A Soul-like that fails the genre and copies from it without really knowing why, where the game mechanics are just plain worse.

So let go in order.

You open Ashen and you get to create your character.
We already have a problem here. If you don't have a controller you better forget about rotating your character. The game SAYS you can, you can't. You'll get to really customize your character with lots of customization options: four, excluding gender.
You can change hair, beard, skin color, and hair color.
But I'll glide over this part, your character customization counts nothing in this game, more on that later.

In my case I was playing with a friend, so we proceeded to put in a password and disable AI companion to then spend an hour not understanding why we could not each other, and especially WHY DOES JOKELL KEEP COMING?! I disabled NPCs, didn't I?
OH, right: Ashen, with the thousands of customization options it has, doesn't show other players with their custom look, that would have been crazy! Players take the appearance of the NPC of your active quest. Even if said NPC is 2 meters tall and all animations are kinda screwed up.

Once we figured it out we started exploring the way too linear map.
The only option is forward, with no crossways or different paths. Just go straight ahead.

One of the signature gameplay mechanics of the game is climbing together, not that you'll ever need it since you could also just spam jump and eventually climb anyway.
You also get to NOT customize your character with armor and weapons.
Weapons are basically just perfectly balanced stat sticks, making one option the same as the other, even against the starting weapons. Do you want a 30% Critical Chance? Sure, there's an axe with that, and 30% less damage to counter it.
The same thing goes for the armor. If it gives 10% more good stats, it will have 10% more negative somewhere else.
A good thing about weapons, though is that they do have some pretty nice and unique movesets, although not many.
When it comes to armor, though. Welp~
Armors are full sets, you cannot do ANY fashion with them. They completely change your character too. You have long hair? Beard? Nope. The armor covers it off or changes it. There are just 2 sets in the whole game that keep your look under it, one of them is the starting set, and the other is from a boss.

Talking of bosses, the game has a single-digit count.
Not gonna say how much, but it's very close to the vote I'll give to this game.
Not that numbers matter, but you would think that with fewer bosses there would be better ideas, and it does seem like that until the final and the DLC boss. The fact that the last two bosses in the game can influence my opinion on boss design so much, says a lot.

Talking of the sorry excuse of a new map called "DLC": It adds a very mediocre Boss, some weapons which are all the same, so I'm not even gonna mention them, and 5 (!!!) armor sets.
The armor sets are the ones of NPCs you've already met.
No, not their armor, but a literal skin.

Let's talk of Loot.
Or, better, the lack thereof.
You're very quickly gonna stop caring about the items around the map, especially because of the lack of any variety in them.
It's, in order of map progression:
- Spear Head to craft stronger spears – very good, you can even throw them at bosses while walking backward to make every fights more trivial then they already are
- the equivalent of Titanite but you find them everywhere
- Scoria - aka Souls – bags

After a bit in the game, you're gonna unlock a storage box.
Even if you choose to store no consumables and only armor and weapons, you can't fit all of them. There's just not enough slots for them.

Talking of consumables, let’s talk of one of my favorite game mechanics.
Imagine.
You're in an hour-long no-checkpoints dungeon, you equipped the classic items on the quick slots, in this case, your "Estus", and the equivalent of a "Homeward Bone" to go back to a checkpoint.
Which you ask? The start of the game, so until you unlock Fast Travel that is NOT a good choice.
But back to the scene: you have the item equipped and when you want to heal, mistakenly, you use the "Homeward Bone" instead of your "Estus". What do you think happens? A prompt asking you if you REALLY wanna do it?
Nope. It just straight-up teleports you out of the dungeon.
To the start of the game, let's not forget.

You know how in souls games you get to recover your souls in case you die?
Well, that is also a mechanic in Ashen, but while Dark Souls leaves them in your latest safe spot, Ashen does not.
It just spawns them exactly where you died, even if that is in the middle of Lava.

But, it's not a big deal, as scoria matters only until half of the game, and after that losing it means nothing since you can only use it on upgrading weapons and the “Estus”.

There's one more thing you find around the map, and it's the
"Ashen Feathers". They increase your Stamina and Health.
Of 2 points.
This is not the progression system of the game, instead Stamina and Health increase by completing steps of side quests. A quest step gives around 15HP or Stamina.
More than 7 feathers are required to barely match the reward of one objective of any mission.

The game has a "Ring" system, having equipable runes with different effects. Some of them are broken, and most of them are just bad. Like a 5% increase in stamina, being called a GREAT upgrade, and even with max Stamina, it's 13.
Again, less than one step of any mission.

I do believe you show a lack of good game design when enemies deal a LOT of damage, but one "Estus" literally fills your health bar from 0 to MAX.

There's no logic in the way checkpoints are placed.
Sometimes they are too close, sometimes you don't get one for 2h in a failed attempt at Blighttown.

Last thing, but probably the most infuriating:
If you fall in water, you don't die. But you gotta get out of there quick.
If you fall in LAVA, you don't die, you can even heal. But you gotta get out of there quick.
If you fall in a PIT, YOU DIE™.

And, to me, when a game has a jump button, not a jump mechanic, it loses the option to kill me from a fall. Do you fall into a pit? Good, you respawn with less health. Would that be broken for Ashen? Then make me spawn near my companion who has to pick me up like during bosses, if that even works since sometimes even in a fight it does it doesn't.

But if you make an hour-long dungeon, in the dark, with platforming and you make me die for just a fall: that is frustratingly bad game design.

Conclusion

This game is mediocre at best and doesn't deserve your money.
The DLC is a 40m dungeon with a bad Boss at the end.
But overall the game was fun.
I do wonder if it was the game fun or the friend I played it with.
I'm leaning more toward the latter.

3/10, like the number of good bosses.

Played it with a friend online Coop.

It was the first soulslike for both of us and we greatly enjoyed it! Near the end it felt a bit unbalanced with upgrades, wepons and souls gaining, but maybe it is optimised for single playing.

It was challenging, we had tons of fun and had to figure strategy and tactics to complete some dungeons

Algumas vezes é melhor apenas aceitar que uns jogos não vão me divertir e seguir em frente.

Movimentação travada e lenta, inimigos que não parecem sentir os golpes e bugs e mais bugs de cenário.

A quem for encarar esse game: Boa Sorte!

We approach the cave exploring the nearby area. My friend and I swear over our headsets peering into the dark. Not because the absence of light produces the traditional primal instinct of fear, but because we know Ashen is about to be irritating through design.

I unhook my shield to carry the lantern, an item that only works when carried by hand rather than on a belt. It's a mystery why. I'm sure the developers thought the mechanic would provide a fun challenge. They are wrong. My friend proceeds as the vanguard with shield raised as I try to light the way. We progress slowly. Soon enough we stumble upon an enemy we called a wraith who raises her arms to do a charge attack. She dashes forward, I dodge to one side but her lock on tracks me mid jump and hits me anyway. The dodge is often useless.

Whilst pinned my friend comes to help hit her off me. A different enemy crawling along the cavern floor comes running from the darkness at him. His lock on fails for no reason leaving him flailing at the barely visible foe. He puts his shield away to bring his own lantern out hoping to set it on the ground to provide light. This allows the enemy to land the final blows with no defence and slow animations. He dies stumbling to his knees hoping for a chance I may revive him, the odds are slim. The wraith finishes her attack allowing my badly eviscerated character to get up. As this happens the camera spins at an angle leaving me confused as I am killed next to my friend frustrated. The lanterns go out.

There is only silence in the dark, but there is max brightness in the settings.