Remnant: From the Ashes Review
As time goes on, I sometimes worry about how much influence the Souls game series has on game design and gaming culture. If four out of every 10 video games made in the 21st century are roguelikes, another three of those 10 are Souls-likes. I understand that having a solid cultural touchstones is important and that chasing a popular model increases sales, but a lot of the time a Souls-like won’t do much to innovate and instead rely on familiarity to boost an otherwise mediocre game. Fortunately, Remnant: From the Ashes is not one of those games.
Remnant is the latest game from Texan game studio Gunfire Games. In Remnant, players are the last, or one of the last, hopes for a dying Earth. Some time in the late 20th century, Earth was invaded by an extradimensional race of sentient trees known as The Root. Because their invasion was so widespread and brutal, humanity was almost entirely wiped out. Now, more than a century later, in an attempt to repel The Root, players are sent from their community to explore the world, fight relentless hordes of enemies, and travel to new dimensions, all in an effort to get to a lighthouse a few miles away.
Joking aside, though the initial plot is a bit silly, the story is probably the best part of Remnant, and I don’t mean just the writing. Because most humans died in the invasion of The Root and most of the non-human people players encounter are much more interested in violence than talking, players don’t receive the standard narration and backstory found in most games. Instead, the story of the world is primarily constructed from the suppositions of survivors, notes left by others years before, and the features of the world itself. Right from the beginning of the game, Remnant shows it’s excellent ability to silently tell a story with the environment. Earth is a crumbling husk, cluttered with hollow, broken buildings, natural life has been wiped out or twisted by the sickly growths of The Root, and the few remaining humans exist in tiny communities in cramped, hidden spaces. The environment wordlessly tells the story of a merciless invasion by an unstoppable force. The other worlds players travel to are similarly adept at environmental storytelling, but I want to leave the details as a surprise for players. Survivor notes, the second way players learn the story of Remnant, are mostly one-off letters written by doomed survivors, but there are also a series of journal entries scattered throughout the worlds written by an enigmatic figure known as The Founder that provide a broader scope of information. The Founder is the person who establish one of the few human refuges on Earth, but also traveled Earth and the other dimensions in search of a way to defeat The Root. His writings include information about pre-invasion Earth as well as insights into the worlds beyond our own. Lastly, the other people players encounter provide the least information of these three, but I can’t blame them as they tend to be survivors of an ongoing tragedy. Conversations with these people show what day-to-day life is like for everyone who isn’t a gun-toting video game protagonist. While not very informational, they ground the story by showing the result the game’s events have on the common folk.
The gameplay of Remnant isn’t as good as its story, but it’s still some of the best I’ve seen this year. At it’s core, Remnant’s gameplay is actually pretty basic. In true Souls-like fashion, players move through areas filled with dangerous enemies, earning experience, finding loot and stopping at checkpoints that fully heal and resupply the player at the cost of repopulating all of the defeated enemies. Additional similarities include equipment weight effecting player mobility, a refillable healing potion replenished at every checkpoint and having to manage a stamina bar while in combat. Where Remnant’s gameplay gets better is the improvement of many Souls-like features as well as the introduction of new ones. I won’t get into all of them, but my favorite changes to the Souls model is that Remnant will actually explain things like how much a player’s maximum health is, how much health a potion will restore, and how long an item’s effect will last.
Where Remnant’s gameplay really gets good is the new things it brings to the table, specifically Mods and Traits. Mods are items that can be equipped to guns and are the reason why guns are the primary form of combat in Remnant. These mods have special abilities that can be activated once enough damage has been done with the gun they are equipped to. These abilities vary from deploying a cloud of restorative mist to launching a swarm of radioactive bees at enemies. What’s better is that the abilities adapt and improve according to the weapons they’re equipped to. As the associated weapon is upgraded, the efficacy of the mod’s ability increases in parallel, which means a newly discovered mod will be just as effective when equipped to a player’s gun as the mod they had been using before. It’s a great way to get players to experiment with new mods without having to worry about losing power. Better still, some mods change depending on what kind of gun they’re equipped to. For example, there is a mod that has a percentage chance to imbue fire damage on rounds fired from the gun. For weapons that fire multiple rounds in a short period of time, such as shotguns or automatic rifles, the percent chance is low because the player is firing many rounds, but for bolt-action rifles the chance to do fire damage becomes 100% because the player is shooting much more slowly. This adaptability further helps players experiment with new play styles and find something that really clicks with them.
Traits, on the other hand, are a lot less showy than mods but do an equally good job of supporting a variety of play options. Traits are small, passive bonuses to player abilities, such as maximum health or reload time. Whenever players earn enough experience to earn a trait point, they can invest in any of the traits they’ve unlocked to increase their bonus. What I really love about the traits system is that players will unlock more traits as they move through the game and the variety of ways players can unlock new traits is fascinating. Some are earned by regularly performing an action in combat, such as unlocking a trait to do more damage to vulnerable parts of enemies like the head by shooting a lot of enemies in the head, while others are unlocked by meeting certain characters in the world, like receiving a bonus to resisting harmful status effects by talking with an ancient protector. The creativity of unlock requirements and the variety of play styles they allow you to build makes these traits wonderful and I hope I see more like them in future games.
I can only say so much about a game in my reviews because I need to keep them a nice readable length so I won’t go any further, but trust me when I say there’s a lot more I love about Remnant: From the Ashes. In a few previous reviews, I’ve mentioned how some games I’ve reviewed so far might be my top game of 2019, but honestly most of them are now behind Remnant. It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a game so much and I hope you experience it for yourself because I’m sure you’ll have a blast.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
