Ashen Review — Russell Troxel

Mar 30

Mar 30 Ashen Review

Have you ever had someone close to you rave about a thing they like that you just couldn’t get into? They spill their adoration for the thing and, when you express your indifference and they insist you “haven’t tried the good version” or “just don’t get it yet.” For me, those things are sushi, dance parties, and the Souls game series.

The Souls series is famous, or infamous, among gamers. It began in 2009 with the release of Demon’s Souls and has continued throughout the years with Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne and, most recently, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. All of these games are built on the same tenets: players will be killed incessantly, when players die they will lose resources and resurrect at a special area, the world and the characters will all exist on a sliding scale between Gloomy Nihilism and Creepy Nihilism, and players won’t know what they’re doing or why because very little story is provided. In spite of this, I have always wanted to like the Souls series. But, the Souls series does not want to like me, so I end up bouncing off of them after a few hours for one or more of these reasons.

Luckily, success breeds imitation and the Souls series has more imitators than Elvis. In order to draw interest, these games have to stick to the core of the Souls series but must change or introduce elements to stand out. Ashen is a recent Souls-like that tries something I haven’t seen before in this genre: it believes things can get better.

In the world of Ashen, life was dark and terrible until an Ashen arrived. Ashen are incomprehensibly massive birds that are the only apparent source of light. An Ashen brings light and life to the world with its coming, but eventually gets old and dies. So civilization exists for long enough to build some impressive structures, but soon falls into ruin with the death of the light. However, the Ashen is destined to resurrect itself, and fortunately the protagonist is there to defend it as it returns to life.

As the hero of Ashen, it’s your responsibility to rebuild the civilization and kill those who would stop you. This is mostly accomplished by going to a specified location, killing a specified creature, and taking something off its corpse. Along the way, you’ll fight off violent raiders and wild animals and explore the ruins of the old world for rewards and equipment. Like all other Souls-like games, combat is tense and highly lethal. But Ashen wants you to succeed, so sends you out into the world with a friend. This companion is typically controlled by an AI but can also be controlled by another player connected via the internet. If you want to explore and fight on your own, you can send your friend back to Vagrant’s Rest, the small town that serves as your home base.

Speaking of it, Vagrant’s Rest is the distilled essence of what sets Ashen apart from other Souls-likes. Having a town isn’t a unique feature within the Souls-like genre, but only in Ashen do the denizens collaborate on something other than complaining. As you progress in the story, new characters will join your town. These characters will work to build your town from a wilderness camp to a bustling community. They will also unlock new shops, upgrades, and side quests.

Missions and side quests are another place where Ashen pulls ahead of the pack. Unlike the rest of the its games in the genre, Ashen helps you on your quests by giving you a map and marking your objectives on it, as well as keeping a list of yet-to-be completed quests. This is a huge shift from the Souls norm, where you get a task from someone who has no interest in telling you anything about how to get the task done.

The creation of a community in Vagrant’s Rest is the most obvious expression of the game’s attitude I mentioned in the start of this review: it believes things can get better. While other Souls-like games proclaim the world is awful and always will be, Ashen knows that, while things are bad now, they can get better if everyone works together. As you help the citizens of Vagrant’s Rest, they help you, either by joining you in your expeditions or offering you new weapons, upgrades, or items. The most heart-warming example is the paranoid Travelers of the wasteland, huddled forms carrying everything they own on their back and lashing out at any perceived threat. As Vagrant’s Rest grows, they will hesitantly join. As they integrate into the community, they tell you how grateful they are to have a place where they can feel safe, and eventually relax, make friends, and offer trading for supplies.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with Ashen is that it sticks so hard to its message of hope and cooperation, you aren’t given a chance to be a bad person. During most quests, you’re sent to retrieve a powerful object for a member of your town. When you retrieve the object, you can either give it to the citizen or not. However, this is a meaningless choice, because if you don’t give it to them, all you get is a bit of hostile dialogue and the chance to give it to them later. This is problematic, because being good when it’s the only choice isn’t really being good, as good is defined only in opposition to evil. The Suffering, a game from the early 2000s, let players be as good or evil as they wanted, but, as they committed more evil acts, their healing items became less potent as punishment. I think Ashen’s message would have been more effective if they had incorporated a system like this, such as making upgrades impossible or making them cost several times the resources as the player has do these things themselves.

Ashen has other, less philosophical problems too. In many Souls-like games, different weapons have noticeably different fighting styles that allow for players to find a weapon that suits their play style. The weapons is Ashen all feel more or less the same, meaning finding a new weapon is not nearly as exciting as it should be. Along those same lines, in Souls-like games players can upgrade their weapons with bizarre items leading to players wielding some truly crazy gear. In Ashen, upgrading simply makes the weapon do more damage, which is useful but falls short of genre expectations. The companion character could also be better. When controlled by an AI, it’s so effective the player don’t need to do much, and when controlled by a human, the companion is wandering off on whatever that player’s personal mission is with no real method of communication.

Ashen is a fun and uplifting game, my favorite of its kind. It takes pieces of the popular Souls genre and gets rid of the obnoxious gloom and impenetrability. Sadly, it also throws away some aspects that made the genre so popular in the first place. The failings hurt because Ashen is good, but it could have been great.