Astral Ascent is the roguelite I’ve been wishing to play for a hot minute. Its combat is highly variable, incredibly replayable, and quite gorgeous. It’s a fantastic example of a roguelite that is easy to pick up, fun to return to, and rewarding despite losing early and often.
This year, I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing and previewing multiple roguelites. 30XX excelled in creating an arcade-y casual experience great for those needing a Mega Man X fix. Get to the Orange Door’s (GTTOD) first-person gameplay blending gunplay and parkour excelled in its boomer-shooter-y goodness while lacking something of a narrative hook and deeper weapon variance. Rightfully, Beary Arms punished me, reminding me of what a bullet hell game should be underneath its charming teddy bear exterior. BlazBlue Entropy Effect’s stylishness compliments its combat that evolves the longer you keep your character alive. Rogue Legacy 2 surprised and delighted me thanks to its metroidvania approach to refreshing the roguelite category in encouraging exploration through biomes chock full of hardcore platforming gauntlets and challenging boss battles. This doesn’t even take into account Summum Aeterna, AK-xolotl, OTXO, Have a Nice Death, and Nightmare Reaper.
I guess this is all to say that 2023 has blessed us with some pretty dang good roguelites. If you’re a fan of the genre’s gameplay variance, combat complexity, and varying degrees of challenge, you’re most likely going to think of this year as a great year for your favorite genre.
When I tell you that Astral Ascent is one of the best roguelites I’ve played this year, and perhaps one of the best in recent memory, you should at least pause and hear me out. By no means am I a roguelite expert, but I would like to think of myself as one who loves games I can pick up and play, enjoy for a short while, and then go to bed after a long day of work. I also love games that remain fresh during a long playthrough despite the core gameplay loop being comprised of the same building blocks. Roguelites meet both of these needs quite well. When a roguelite game can make me happy on both fronts, I become more likely to play and replay it. For a while, Hades was that game on my Nintendo Switch. Now? It’s most likely going to be Astral Ascent.
Astral Ascent portrays itself as a 2D-platformer roguelite set in a fantasy world. Starring multiple fully-voiced heroes, the player is tasked of helping one of the heroes escape from a celestial prison known as the Garden. Between them and the exit stand twelve bosses (The Zodiac) who act as gatekeepers to keep the beings within the confines of the Garden. If the hero fails to escape from the Garden’s beautifully drawn biomes, they’re sent back to the entrance where they must escape anew. You know – typical roguelite things.
Let’s get my main quibble out of the way before I continue: Astral Ascent is not the most complex platformer by any stretch of the imagination. While its levels contain mild platforming elements like wall climbing/jumping, dash portals that zoom your hero across the screen, and floating platforms positioned high enough to necessitate a simple double jump or a dash jump, very little of the levels’ layouts contribute toward a feeling of mastery obtained after a challenging platforming segment. A good platformer will challenge players and make them feel like they’re good at gaming when they successfully complete a gauntlet. I didn’t get that from Astral Ascent. Instead, I got something much different but just as good.
This isn’t to say that platforming is absent from Astral Ascent, however. Heroes’ movements are agile and fluid thanks to double jumping, bouncing on enemies, dashing through enemies, wall jumping, and some occasional platforming sequences during boss battles. They’re just less present than Astral Ascent’s stellar combat.
This one quibble aside, I thoroughly enjoyed Astral Ascent because of its deep and fun roguelite combat. If you’re looking for a roguelite that requires you to master platforming mechanics and feel like a “good” platforming player, you most likely won’t get that feeling of mastery from this game. If you want a really dang good roguelite title, continue reading.
In my review of Dave the Diver, I praised it for continuously surprising and delighting me for introducing new mechanics on a consistent pace. Astral Ascent utilizes elements of surprise to keep things fresh and gradually introduce new gameplay mechanics, passive power boosts to make future runs easier, and additional side missions that ensure that future runs remain rewarding.
Instead of combo-complexity in the form of directional inputs, Astral Ascent utilizes attack-variability to keep combat fresh and unique during each new run. Each hero has their own set of simple attacks that feel distinct, a unique signature spell, along with four copies of the same single spell that’s available at the start of a run. Variance is introduced in the form of spell swapping, which allows you to not only swap the order of your spells but to swap out new spells you encounter when successfully completing a room. If you don’t like the spell, you can disenchant it for currency and spend it later in the run.
Some of you might be concerned about the variance in spells – there are quite a few to learn. Since there are so many heroes and individual sets of spells, you would assume that the learning curve is quite steep as you figure out which spells to take on the current run and in future runs. Not here! When selecting a new spell, a PREVIEW button allows you to see a little animation of what the spell looks like without literally forcing you to take the spell and hope that it works. The inclusion of that preview significantly softens the learning curve for new players and makes me more likely to test things out. I love it. All roguelites should have player-friendly previews to help with the onboarding process, to be honest.
On top of the spell variance, each spell can be modified with gambits that can be acquired as rewards from some rooms. The gambit system lets players add up to four additional effects to their spells, further augmenting them and making each fun feel different from the last. For instance, some gambits trigger on spell cast whereas others inflict an effect on a per-hit basis. This makes your spells feel as though they’re increasing in power as they’re evolving.
Characterbuilding takes center stage thanks to gambit and spell swapping system. It’s complicated at first, don’t get me wrong, but once you figure out what you want from the spells that become available to you it becomes easier to manage. The only other recent roguelite that does anything close to this is BlazBlue Entropy Effect. It feels good to unlock additional power during a run, especially when it is properly scaled against enemies of increasing difficulty and power. Astral Ascent doesn’t have a glaring issue with power level, thankfully – it avoids the rubberbanding effect of characters being too weak at the start and too strong later on. It also successfully avoids the pitfall of some spells being drastically more powerful than others because of the gambit system’s variance that changes up how power is obtained and specialized on a per-spell basis. Other sources of power variance exist, too, but for the sake of spoilers I’ll encourage you to see what they do rather than telling you what they do.
Like most other roguelites, you should expect to lose often. Heck, it may take you several hours to beat the first boss or even an optional celestial miniboss who may interrupt your run should you choose to face it. Either way – losing felt very rewarding. Each time I lost to an enemy or a boss, I had quite a lot to return to and upgrade in the Garden Hub, be it permanent stat upgrades like more health or adding new spells to my pool of spells for each character. Additional NPCs reward you for completing side missions and grant you temporary buffs for a few hours, such as receiving some health upon entering a new room.
The other nice thing about Astral Ascent’s runs is that you can easily step away from them. Upon entering a new room, you can easily save and quit your run without outright terminating your progress. If you need a break mid-run, the game allows you to take it. Very few roguelites have a system baked into the system like this, often relying on players to pause and hope they can return after the fact. This is a great alternative to putting your device to sleep.
Coming out of Astral Ascent, it’s clear that it excels on being friendly to new players while engaging for players wanting deep levels of combat variance. Throughout my playthrough, I struggled to step away because of its high replay value that kept convincing me to do just one more run. It clearly communicates mechanics without hiding things behind massive walls of text and encourages players to mix-and-match abilities in a way that rewards gumption. Power levels gradually increase the longer you’re able to survive in a run, rewarding you with a properly-paced feeling of growing stronger. Did you die sooner than you should have? No worries – you’ll be rewarded either way. It’s how roguelite mechanics should
The story’s pacing can very easily be interpreted as slow, compounded by the fact that there’s no clear “enemy” or hook that pulls the player into learning more about the world. The few secrets that can be found offer small glimpses into the lore, but the story itself lacks a movement to keep up with the pace of the player growing stronger from previously failed runs. I wanted something to continuously push me toward escaping the Garden despite characters insisting that it was their goal.
Astral Ascent is gorgeous. Its spritework is detailed, utilizing Eastern environmental art styles with anthropomorphic NPCs. Despite the vividness of the environments, characters, enemies, and ability effects, readability is far from a concern. Enemies clearly telegraph their attacks while their projectiles visibly stand out (in red, by default). The character portraits that appear alongside dialogue as well as its fully animated cutscenes make the game look like a television show.
Sound and combat are immensely satisfying. Moving between rooms involves fluid transitions and makes the game feel continuously airy. When spells hit enemies, the effects look flashy, sound crisp, and feel refreshing regardless if they land. The sound and art design hit the sweet spot of looking feeling, and sounding great.
I don’t consider Astral Ascent to be as punishing or difficult as other recent roguelites because of how well it masks the punishing aspect of losing. Bosses have multiple attack phases and hit HARD. Enemies gradually get stronger as you do. I am 100% sure that my runs were as unsuccessful in this short period of review time as they were when I first picked up Hades a few years ago. I lost just as frequently. However, your mileage will vary. If you’re unfamiliar with the roguelite genre, you may struggle a smidge with getting combat to be optimal against bosses and harder enemies. If you’re a fan of the roguelite genre like me, then you might not feel like you’re struggling as much as you typically do when picking up a new roguelite.
Astral Ascent is the roguelite I’ve been wishing to play for a hot minute. Its combat is highly variable, incredibly replayable, and quite gorgeous. It’s a fantastic example of a roguelite that is easy to pick up, fun to return to, and rewarding despite losing early and often.
