Dark Souls serves Ashen's premise but does not define its conclusion. By instilling senses of community and devotion inside its narrative, Ashen proves Souls' discourse expands beyond punishment and brutality. Once separated from its inspiration, Ashen has plenty to show off inside of its common space.
It’s exciting to witness Dark Souls’ influence spread across contemporary games. Watching Necropolis apply Souls’ ideals to a modern roguelike and seeing Salt and Sanctuary’s reproduce Souls in two dimensions have been two of the better surprises in a growing field. Ashen, the long-in-development Souls-like from A44, is both an unabashed clone and a defiant newcomer. Through its natural flow and its narrative execution, Ashen adds more than it borrows from Souls’ parlance.
Control is Ashen’s first point of contact and basic source of familiarity. In the right hand is a melee weapon and on the right shoulder buttons are light and heavy attacks. The left hand can be used for a shield, along with the left shoulder buttons for blocking and parrying. Face buttons can be used to run, take a step back, and use an item. Damage consumes health while action—attacking, blocking, running—consumes stamina. This is Dark Souls’ model and Ashen lifts it, all of it, with frank honesty.
Ashen plays the same but feels different. Gone is the severe and extremely metal take on gothic folklore and in its place is minimalist low fantasy. This manifests in a collection of diverse biomes that exhibit the polygonal power of a late generation PlayStation 2 title but with artistic sophistication of a modern adventure game. Ashen is wistful without submitting to whimsy and powerful without resorting to muscular displays of graphics technology. This Spartan aesthetic does well to serve Ashen’s communal, egalitarian themes.
Scoria is Ashen’s currency. It is acquired by vanquishing minor and major foes, completing quests, or via small item pouches found in the world. It’s spent on health and weapon upgrades, consumable purchases, and minor crafting items. It’s lost upon dying and, as one may expect, available to recover if you can make it back to the same place without dying again. Scoria isn’t especially vital to Ashen’s operation—there is no character level and stats are mostly governed by equipment—but it’s still crushing to lose a large portion of it on a failed gamble.
Structure is linear with extensive space for opt-in exploration. Vagrant’s Rest is your base of operations. Escalating quests demand you move south through smoky cliffs in the Stormed Ruins, east through wide-open ramshackle planes in The Whispers, and then north into claustrophobic cliff-side hovels in The Loom. Ashen’s (relatively) short run time of 20 to 25 hours keeps its pace tight and its direction focused. There’s room to explore—and equipment and items are waiting to be found—but you’re never kept in any single place for too long.
Ashen deliberately scales back the myriad options the genre usually affords to the player. Armor, equipped as a single piece along with an optional shield, arrives in incremental updates found along the way. The next-up piece either has dramatically better defense or parallel stats with marginal differences to health and stamina. Fewer options in a game of Ashen’s class is generally seen as a negative, but, in this case, it feels more like a basic incentive for avoiding obtuse inventory management. It wants to reward the player for finding something useful, not bog them down in menus and screens obsessing over miniscule differences.
Weapons allow for a bit more agency. One-handed weapons arrive as clubs and axes while two-handed weapons, which negate the use of the shield, are often huge, plodding damage-dealing beasts. Each can be upgraded with easily available resources. I used a club for the entirety of Ashen because I learned and became comfortable with the timing of its swings. Integrating heavy charge attacks inside of my light combos partitioned my stamina nicely, too. Ashen may have fared better if it incentivized the usage of different weapons, but it’s at least comfortable in its austerity.
A majority of player upgrades arrive via the emerging population back at Vagrant’s Rest. Travelling into the world allows you to meet non-playable characters who can craft stat-buffing talismans, create increasingly lethal spears, open fast-travel, fashion more powerful lanterns, and concoct dangerous temporary potions. Completing side quests for each of these characters increases the effectiveness of their innate abilities. Considering the necessity of their talents—Jokell essentially unlocks your refilling health potion—it’s hard to consider a majority of them as optional.
Vagrant’s Rest, as a town, is one of Ashen’s most important assets. It begins as the dilapidated ruins of a forgotten village. As you leave and come back, the scavenger population slowly returns and begins to restore its architecture. The ambiance of the Vagrant’s Rest compliments its slow return to glory, quietly surprising the player with the construction of a community. It’s a nice, warm place to call home, especially after trudging through Ashen’s monstrous cave dungeons.
Ashen’s caves are one of its finer mysteries. A majority of the game isn’t hard—it isn’t easy, but it also isn’t trying replicate that particular measure of Souls—but the second cave, Seat of the Matriarch, is a swift kick to the back of the head. Its darkness requires a lantern, which disables the use of a shield or a two-handed weapon. The winding, labyrinthine cave houses skeleton statues that come to life and, at its most threatening moments, screaming witches that pounce on the player and never get up. Coupled with narrow pathways, dead ends, and a length that can be described as “uncomfortably long,” Ashen’s most harrowing moments take shape in its bleak dungeons.
Fortunately, Ashen is designed as a cooperative experience. One of the inhabitants of Vagrant’s Rest will join the player inside of dungeons and out in the field. In most games a cooperative A.I. is a liability but, in Ashen, they’re actually quite capable. They typically engage their opponents without fear (and they’ll get wrecked if you just sit back and watch) and routinely draw agro in boss fights. In my experience they had trouble negotiating tight walking spaces and sometimes they would go AWOL, but generally they’re well behaved (it’s also possible to play Ashen with other legitimate human beings. I do not have Xbox Live Gold and wasn’t able to experience this, but its passive nature has drawn comparisons to Journey in the month since its debut).
Ashen is also loaded with smaller, quality-of-life touches that separate it from its peers. Jumping, a notorious drag in the Souls games, is an effective mechanic. You character will pull him or herself up ledges with ease and usually makes any jump that seems within a reasonable distance. Given the profundity of items in hard-to-reach areas, this is a godsend. Spears in Ashen, at a certain point, also create a form of teleportation to hard-to-reach areas. They’re a consumable resource and double as Ashen’s only method of ranged combat, creating a real risk and reward with your inventory and their implementation. While not immediately obvious, both contributions affect Ashen’s performance and reception. It seeks to improve and add to the idea of a Souls-like.
Lingering questions exist as to the nature of Ashen’s world. I understand that enemies constantly respawn as a mechanic, but have no idea why this happens in the context of the game. The same thing goes for my partners whenever they submit to the consequences of my poor play and die, only to come back at the next checkpoint. Ashen’s story isn’t especially rich—a premise about a fallen god returning to the land is subservient to interpersonal aspects of character and community—and it doesn’t quite assemble every piece of its world.
There are also some areas where Ashen demonstrates unintended weakness. It isn’t fully equipped to deal with multiple enemies, straining both the player’s ability to effectively switch between them and engage more than two simultaneously. Item locations are also a bit on the risky side, bending level geometry in a way where you’re not sure if a means of acquisition is physically possible. Both of these instances stand out in a game that, otherwise, carries the refinement of a creation that spent a long time in production.
Ashen strips down Souls’ archetype into a digestible allocation of a stay-in weekend. This may be its most valuable spin on the formula, as it rarely paces itself out of the player’s valuable time. It treats traditional complexity as artifice one should be willing to look past, and in the process takes what’s most appreciated about Souls games and crams it in a focused, and yet unquestionably serene, package. Its ambiance, from its contemplative mood to its delicately complex music, helps define its reflective nature.
Joy, the clear emotion absent from Ashen’s callous peers, is always right around the corner. It’s there every time you return to Vagrant’s Rest and, more traditionally, found in toppling one of Ashen’s five bosses. Its zenith is reached in Proud Lathyrus, a bustling assemblage of middle-eastern-influenced architecture bathed in light and diametrically opposed to The Loom’s lingering darkness. Ashen has moments of unexpected scale and surprise, which isn’t what I expected from what, until that point, was a fairly muted aesthetic. Joy is a suitable replacement for dread.
There are also deeper metaphors applied toward Ashen’s treatment of light and darkness. This is overtly visible in the worldwide narrative as you work to restore the age of light, but also present through Ashen’s basic operation. Using a lantern is objectively a measure of preservation, and yet it leaves the player vulnerable to basic damage. By trusting the immaterial divine or the intangible group they must let go of physical safety. This falls in line with Ashen’s focus on community and anti-individualism, ensuring that boldly trusting in the goodwill of others leads to a path of security.
Of course, it’s also possible to enjoy Ashen as a light and imaginative day trip across a low fantasy landscape. Teaming up with either A.I. or strangers is an effective way to beat the living shit out of capable but mortal enemies and it’s fun to poke around the edges and look for loot. It isn’t necessary to look beneath its skin in search of a beating heart, but it’s more fulfilling to know the game you’re playing is living outside of a personal experience.
Dark Souls serves Ashen’s premise but does not define its conclusion. By instilling senses of community and devotion inside its narrative, Ashen proves Souls’ discourse expands beyond punishment and brutality. Once separated from its inspiration, Ashen has plenty to show off inside of its common space.
