this game is what you get if you were to combine nuclear throne and the binding of isaac...
which sounds amazing, but it doesn't work as well as you'd hope.
enter the gungeon has fun gameplay and aesthetic, but as a roguelike it feels like an absolute drag. maybe i'm just not playing it right, but the lack of ammo resources and the absolutely gigantic stages make the game feel like a slow tip toe through a gigantic labyrinth. it's not like a slower roguelike is bad, per se. i mean, isaac can be pretty slow but i think it makes up for that with the simple and definitive upgrades you can add to your character. with gungeon, it feels like you're always just one good item behind of a satisfying run, constantly. probably the most useful thing you can get are well, guns. but for a game all about guns, it sure is costly to overuse them! maybe i'm not playing the game right, but as someone who is more used to nuclear throne's pace, i feel like i'm constantly starving for ammo. maybe the game would go faster if i used anything but my default gun more often, but as soon as i get to the boss i'm regretting ever having used my new toys in the first place. it's frustrating in that way.
it's sad to see that people consider this the "definitive" roguelike gun game when nuclear throne, the perfect little darling, is sitting right there.

i dunno! like i said, i could be playing the game wrong. i'll probably give it another shot (haha) soon to see if experimenting a little more will make me find my love for the game. but until then...!

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.

may be the ideal platformer. this game is so well paced it makes me wanna run a marathon. completely nails its core mechanics of 'jump dash ohfuck hold on jumpjumpjumpjumpjump'. every obstacle feels like its mathematically in the right place all of the time. every aspect of celeste fits together so well it makes me want to throw up. the dash is one of the most fun and satisfying mechanics ive ever used, up there with dark souls dodge roll and clicking the shoot your shotgun button in doom. its also a beautiful game, taking pixel art in an ethereal glowy direction that i didnt know i needed. the core story about a down on her luck girl who climbs a mountain to get her mind off things is lovely, and the gameplay tells the story of climbing a mountain effortlessly. nintendo wishes they were creative enough to make this game. and thank god they arent.

Like plenty of other people, I assume, I decided to try out OTXO after watching Raycevick's video that showered it with praise. Hotline Miami is one of my favorite games, and favorite game series, of all time, so a Hotline Miami inspired game felt right up my alley. I was looking forward to endlessly playing this for months on end if it was as good as Raycevick made it sound. However, while I understand most of the praise being given to this game, I ultimately just can't agree with it. It sacrifices so much of what made Hotline Miami work in service of its roguelike design that it ends up completely losing what made Hotline Miami so special in the first place.

I'll start of by pointing out what I liked about the game. The art style is pretty interesting, it's not the most unique style I've ever seen, but it gives the game a decently firm sense of identity. I also liked the general feel of the game, while I think it misses the mark of what Hotline Miami was aspiring to by quite a lot, it still manages to create a great combat loop, one that I would have loved a lot more if I wasn't constantly thinking about Hotline Miami while I was playing it.

Okay, now to get onto my big problem with the game.

Something that Raycevick forgot to mention (or maybe purposely didn't mention) while he was talking about Hotline Miami in his video was the importance of the quick restart. When you die in Hotline Miami, you just press a single button and you're thrown immeidtlay back in the fray with no loading screen. You just have to start at the beginning of the floor you died on. I firmly believe that this mechanic is the single most important aspect of Hotline Miami; it's what ties everything else together.

Hotline Miami is a game about aggression. reaction, and memorization. You're encouraged to run through the levels as fast as you can, obliterating anyone in front of you with whatever you have on you. And if you die? So what? Hit the restart button and get right back into it! The more you play, the more you'll memorize the layout of the buildings, the paths of the bots, and the reactions those bots will have. Once you get really good at the game, you can just blow through a level without even having to stop. Even those crazy levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number with ridiculously large areas become bearable once you remember death just means a quick restart. You're supposed to be a train going at ridiculously high speeds, and when you get into that conductor seat, there's really nothing else like it.

This is why the game is designed the way it is. Why enemies kill you in one hit, why you kill them in one hit, why enemies don't react to the carnage around them when you're using a silenced gun, and why enemies might not react to you if you're behind an ajar door. Every single thing is designed to make you be as fast and aggressive as possible, and it all starts with that quick restart.

Without that, you just wouldn't have Hotline Miami anymore.

And this is my biggest problem with OTXO.

Since OTXO is a roguelike that forces you to start at the very beginning of the game upon death, the game can't treat death as lightly as Hotline Miami. If the player could just die in one hit and be forced to go back to the beginning, it would be a miserable experience. And so, the game tips the scales in the player's favor in a more explicit manor than Hotline Miami does. It gives you way more health than the enemies, an insta-kill melee attack, and a bullet-time-like ability. And all of these are outside of the roguelike upgrades you can get!

But that's not all! Without the quick restart, the game also can't ask players to memorize layouts or enemy patterns, that would get far too frustrating far too quickly. So, it makes up for that by relying on procedurally generating level layouts, aside from the bosses who seem to all be the same as far as I can tell.

All of these shifts combined result in a game that is basically the exact opposite of Hotline Miami in a painfully frustrating way.

The level design gets so boring and tedious after only a few runs, bullet-time feels like a crutch to overly aid the player, enemies feel random and indistinct, and worst of all, the game doesn't feel fast.

Okay sure, it does feel fast, but not Hotline Miami fast. I'm not charging through these rooms obliterating everything I see as fast as I can for the thrill of it; I'm slowing bashing down doors and killing a few random dudes by going into slow-mo and trying to go quick so I can make more money to buy upgrades that are actually a little useful. Not only does it not feel quite like Hotline Miami, it feels like its in a completely different ballpark.

Also now that I mentioned it, I have to talk about the money system which reward you more money the faster you are. Hotline Miami also had an external reward for going fast, but that was just a high score and ranking system, it only mattered to the people who wanted to get A+ rankings. That way, people who were more timid could still play the game and get through it by doing the bare minimum. But in OTXO if you aren't fast, you're never going to get past the first floor, and that's something I just find aggravating.

There's also a few other issues I have, like how the story tries to be convoluted and unclear like Hotline Miami but fails to understand why Hotline Miami did that, and how you have to spend the money used for upgrades to unlock new weapons and trinkets which I find excessively annoying, but I don't think those complaints are all that important. My big problem is with the game's refusal to understand what made Hotline Miami work all while trying to "enhance" it.

Overall, I don't think OTXO is a bad game, but I don't think its a particularly great game either. It it was trying to be its own thing and had a visual style and gameplay that didn't just invoke Hotline Miami, I might have loved it. But as it is right now, I just can't recommend it to anyone that's coming to it in hopes of getting that same rush they got from playing Hotline Miami for the first time. If you want to play something that invokes the same sense of speed while having unique gameplay, please play Katana Zero instead. Or hell, just download the free community made levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. To me, there's just no real reason to play OTXO if you're a huge Hotline Miami fan like I am, and that's a damn shame.

The soundtrack is really good though.