Ashen Critique Script

Ashen is half Souls-like and half something else. Unexpectedly, it's the something else that I ended up enjoying more, despite being a huge fan of Souls and its clones. I'd put Ashen slightly above The Surge on the list of these types of games. It has some problems, some achievements, and is probably ten dollars too expensive for how much content you're going to get. It's not a small game—it took me just over twenty hours to finish—but that doesn't mean all of those hours were full of fresh quality content.

I can recommend the game easily to two types of people: those who are so enamored with Souls-like combat that they can't get enough, and those who want to see that combat system used with a different kind of framing. Most of Ashen's levels are open and available to be explored in which ever way you choose. You can run, jump, and climb with far more freedom than in any other game that I've played that has this type of combat system. For me, this made the game worth it since I've always wondered if Souls combat could work in something close to an open world. Thanks to Ashen I can say that it can.

I'm going to get into spoilers now, starting with some numbers about how many areas there are in the game. If you're sensitive about that you may want to stop watching. Everyone else is safe for a few more minutes before I get into the bigger moments that you may want to experience by playing the game yourself.

The biggest issue I have with Ashen can be seen right here on its world map. There are seven areas. That may not be a fair way to quantify the content since some zones are far larger than others, but that's how they're presented in the game so we'll go with that for now. On top of these areas you have two massive dungeons that are not shown on the map, along with some smaller caves that when combined are about a third of a dungeon.

It's difficult to properly convey just how large these dungeons are without a guided tour so for the sake of discussion I'll just say that each of them are worth the same size as one of the larger zones on the map. This gives players quite a lot of ground to traverse while exploring Ashen, especially since chunks of these maps have layered vertical stacks for you to climb or fall through. At a cursory glance this is an impressive amount of content.

The problem is that most of these zones are similar to each other. You'll be running around the same kind of rolling hills and valleys that only look a little different. There are exceptions and it's worth pointing out that these zones are never identical, but only the dungeons and final two areas struck me as being significantly different than what I had seen in the first forest area. This makes sense since the game takes place tightly in a region of Ashen's world so each area should share some features but it becomes monotonous regardless.

More dungeons could have granted necessary breaks if there were enough that most areas had one. Unfortunately they bring their own problems to the table despite providing some much needed variety in how you explore Ashen's world.

See one of the best things about this game is that you can dash around and climb your way to a plethora of secrets. Whether that's one of many weapons you'll find scattered through the zones, or special feathers that reward you with permanent stat upgrades—a small boost to your health or stamina. Since you cannot use your "Souls" – or Scoria, as the game calls its currency – on leveling your character, finding these feathers always feels like a great moment.

The marriage of this system with Souls-like combat is a surprising success. Most Souls games do reward exploration but mostly from fanatically searching every corridor, doorway, and sometimes performing awkward running jumps. Ashen allows far more experimentation and often has a reward if you test the limits of where you can run, jump, and climb.

However, it's not all bonfires and sun praising. First up is that sometimes you can get yourself stuck by jumping your way to a place the game never intended for you to get to. Sometimes there are invisible walls to block you from going out of bounds—which are a tolerable solution as far as I'm concerned. Other times you will simply die. Worse are the platforms that seem to be leading you to explore them by having some sort of breakable object or some birds on them. Sometimes these lead to a treasure. Sometimes they lead to nothing. Sometimes the ledge grab flat-out doesn't work. I'd say it was successful the majority of the time but with the penalty for death being sent back to a bonfire-like ritual stone and the possibility of you losing all of your Scoria, I wonder if falling to your death could have been reworked in some way. Especially since I sometimes felt reluctant to experiment with jumping and climbing due to these issues.

The problem links back to Ashen's levels in that the open areas feel very similar mechanically as well as visually. You have sprawling hills and cliffs and places to climb in each of them that you can tackle in almost any order that you like. The dungeons are so few and far between—with the second and final one being right before the end of the game—that there isn't much twisty, interconnected level design of tighter corridors and rooms to break things up.

Unfortunately the dungeons that are in the game showcase another problem that was second on my list of disappointments. Enemy variety. Almost all of the combat encounters in Ashen will be against human enemies with similar movesets. There are only six exceptions I can think of: simple dogs (slash) wolves, a giant spider, a shadowy humanoid with dramatically different attack patterns involving teleports and charges, a lumbering hippopotamus boar that shows up late in the game and is rarely encountered, a crawling humanoid that runs at you, and a large armored crab monster which sticks out in my memory as the most interesting enemy in the game—and one that you encounter in the first main area.

Every other fight will be against humans standing on two feet wielding an assortment of weapons with basic attack patterns. The most creative thing you'll see from those in this group with be some small explosions after a weapon strikes the floor, or a jumping attack that never looked quite right whenever I saw it.

Remember that Ashen is at least a twenty hour experience unless you are rushing through it. That is a lot of time spent fighting the same enemies again and again. It's made worse by how large the two dungeons are—so large that they feel like they were made as a result of someone daring the designer to make them so big—and how they are relentlessly crammed with the same enemy type over and over and over in every room and corridor.

Enemy variety is crucial to get right in a game that focuses so much on combat, but it's doubly important in a Souls-like game that doesn't add anything new on the player's end. Nioh also has a problem with enemy variety—although not nearly as bad as Ashen—and that's mostly acceptable because of how much complexity it stacks on with stances, special moves, and the interaction between the two with its stamina system. Even The Surge, which has almost all of the same problems that Ashen does, has more on the player's end with armor and limb targeting while locked on.

Ashen doesn't just have the comparatively bare bones system that Dark Souls has: it's even lower than it. You cannot two hand small weapons. There was no parry or backstab that I could discover—although you can land critical hits and shield bash instead of kick. The heavy attacks with some weapons look so close to identical to the regular attack that I had to squint to determine if they were different at all. The only thing I can see as increasing options over the Dark Souls base is that your dodge roll becomes a different quick step like in Bloodborne when you're locked on.

Dark Souls instead focuses much more on adding complexity through the enemy encounters side of the game. This is a topic I touched briefly on in the Mariah Carey Odyssey video and I hope to return to it in a future Nioh video although I have no idea when that will be. But for now I think it's safe to say that Ashen falls drastically short in this area—disappointingly, it does so for bosses as well since there are only five of them.

The best way to point this out is that at the end of the game you travel to a mysterious, mythical place known as the Gnaw. This is communicated to you as being a Capital B Big Deal, and there is not a single new type of enemy anywhere in the zone. This is a tragic misstep.

One of my favorite moments in Ashen sadly makes this issue worse. And it really is a good moment so take this as your second spoiler warning. It's like a better version of the spectacle you see at the beginning of the game when the light bursts open far in the distance. It's when you encounter Gefn.

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Up until now the game felt a bit on the bland side. I was enjoying the visuals and open nature of the starting zone but nothing felt adventurous about Ashen. Then this giant mermaid goddess shows up with a deliberate focus on having facial features when every other character does not, and suddenly anything is possible. I was now on an adventure and this feeling was reinforced soon after this when I saw a giant flying Windfish soaring above the next area. Anything can happen now. What other wondrous things are waiting for me in this world?

Unfortunately, not much.

The first dungeon is an odyssey of a journey to the underbelly of Ashen's world, and I'd wager that it's where players are going to die the most throughout the game. It's possible that I missed a checkpoint down there somewhere but if I didn't that means every death will require you to do a lot of running and waiting around for your AI companion to open a door for you just so you can get back to the start of the dungeon. Just running past all of the enemies to the end takes a considerable amount of time.

This is where Ashen becomes difficult to properly gauge for me. If you know nothing about the game your ears may have perked up when I said "AI companion" in the previous paragraph. Ashen has an interesting seamless multiplayer option: there is always an AI helper with you during your journey, and if another player is available and in the same area as you they can smoothly take control of it. And same goes for you. So your buddy Joekell might be an AI one minute and then a player the next. And on someone else's screen you might be the Joekell, even though you still look like your own character that you made at the start of the game.

I turned this multiplayer feature off while I played—for two reasons. The first is that I prefer to play Souls-like games solo and I wanted to continue that tradition. The second is that before I realized the option was on by default I found it annoying that my AI helper would phase in and out of existence when a player was joining my game—and I didn't want to worry that I may potentially be wasting someone's time when I wasn't doing the quest that they were currently following.

Unfortunately turning the AI companion off completely didn't always work properly. Even with the option off they would still appear. Not that it ultimately mattered because some areas can only be reached with a helping hand so I consider it mandatory to leave it on. You need your buddy to boost up higher walls and open some doors, although there is an upgrade that allows you to do the latter solo—at the cost of one of Ashen's "ring slots".

The dilemma I'm facing here is that I can't help but perceive the dungeons and bosses in Ashen as being designed for two players—or at the very least an AI that sometimes lucks his way into tanking enough hits to be useful. I also have to acknowledge that playing the game with an actual person could change the experience significantly in many ways depending on who you have along for the journey. It could make things far easier, far more difficult, more fun if you're on voice chat, or frustrating if you're trying to communicate solely through in-game gestures. This would turn an appraisal of Ashen into something that's more about the friend you had along for the ride rather than the game's balance and placement of enemies. And I don't think it's a good idea to make long YouTube videos about the quality of your friends... ...anymore.

The result is that sometimes I felt that the game was way too easy and needed to step things up a bit. And other times I felt like I was fighting large groups of enemies that were not designed for one person on their own. Which sounds horribly contradictory now that I'm reading it back but that's how extreme a swing the game went to sometimes, especially in that first dungeon.

All of this may sound like I had a terrible time with Ashen, even though if I was to score it I'd give it a 7 out of 10. While that's part of the problem of making videos that focus a bit too much on the negative parts of games, it's also something I could be better about mitigating. So let's talk about some of the good things because, despite nothing living up to that meeting with the mermaid, Ashen had a few more surprises that I enjoyed.

The first is how the game handles friendly NPCs and leveling up. Like I said earlier you cannot spend Scoria on your own stats—only to upgrade your weapons, buy items, and enhance your estus flask. Leveling is tied to quest completion. This alone would be enough to make quests feel more worth your time, but the home town that your NPC following starts to build also expands as these quests are completed. This area goes from part of the wilderness, to having a few small scaffolds, and ends with a cluster of impressive houses and a dock on the river. At first I didn't like how often I was being forced to return to this area, but once I saw how substantial the progression was going to be—and unlocked the flying fast travel monster—I looked forward to completing a quest just to see how the settlement would change.

Because I'm me I do have one crumb of criticism about this: the world design of Ashen leads you to one area after the other with little room for exploring past the point you're currently meant to be on. This a line you follow getting ever farther away from where you started. If the zones had been laid out in a spiral around the central hub instead, with paths often looping back to your town, it could have allowed for more exploration while also giving you the chance to see your town grow from a distance as you return instead of warping into the middle of it and then having to look around.

Despite criticizing the game's lack of combat options earlier there was one part of it that I grew to like more as time went on: the use of light and your lantern. Ashen fully commits to areas being so dark that you can't see anything without using a light source. Which means relying on your occasional brain dead buddy, sacrificing your shield arm—or, in my case, switching from a two handed weapon to a one hander. You do have the option to put down your lantern and fight around it but this was too much micromanagement for me to consider doing regularly in dungeons that are this large.

At first I wasn't fond of this system because I wanted to use the weapon I had chosen. But now I see the game forcing me to switch up my playstyle—facilitated by two weapon slots that are easy to switch between. I do still think that the game could have been more measured in how many dark areas there are—especially since the dungeon zones felt dominated by darkness and could have perhaps allowed you to light some areas up as you progressed—but I think it was a successful exploration of the system.

I can't say the same for throwing spears to teleport around areas, although it wasn't a complete failure. The way it works currently is simply too clunky. Aiming with the analogue stick never felt right, and there was always some downtime while waiting to see if the spear would land on target, then wait for the teleport to start and finish. Having a lock on to the targets if you're not currently in combat may have been a good idea, as would be making the process faster so it could have been used more regularly in some areas. Maybe a low damage infinite use spear could have also opened up the possibility for areas that require a lot of usage of the teleport to explore some creative level design.

The final thing I want to speak about are the bosses. Four of these feel like super powered versions of normal enemies. They've been made a bit bigger and have a tiny bit more spectacle, but even the final two bosses feel like they could come back as regular enemies if they were stripped of their single most special move—and the first two literally do come back as regular enemies in such an uneventful way that you may not even notice at first.

Ashen's bosses are not awful but they were definitely not a highlight. They tease the possibility of using their fighting arenas in cool ways but even when it happens, it's not that impressive. Coupled with the fact that I beat the first four bosses on my first try and one of those times I was being ambushed by my oldest son searching for Christmas presents in the room I was playing in...

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...and I think it goes to show how much better the boss fights could have been. Or, if there were many more of them, that these could have been some of the more ordinary fights that made the others that much more special.

Because there is one boss that was quite enjoyable: Amiren, at the end of the first proper dungeon about halfway through the game.

Not only does this boss have the best build up to the fight as you walk through this long, forgotten corridor at the bottom of the world, it also has a mechanic that is a twisted version of one that you carry. Literally carry. Amiren has a corrupted lantern that she uses throughout the fight. She uses it to create damage zones on the floor, throws it at you and then follows it up with another attack, and it even acts as a weakpoint that you can notice to hit that causes the fight to change. I don't know if it's possible to win this fight without doing this but realizing that the lantern could be damaged, and then the fight changing because of that on top of Amiren having the most interesting boss moveset in the game, made this fight not just good for Ashen but good among all Souls-like games.

There's more I could speak about—how the visuals and scale of the game were a real treat, that inventory limitations were terrible and make no sense since you already have plenty of reasons to return to your base, that it was satisfying to master flicking yourself forward with a quick running jump, that there were perhaps too many weapons and that it was difficult to justify switching when upgrading them was so expensive, a few hitbox issues, and that the introductory creation myth of Ashen's world was a wonderful opening. But the point of these shorter videos is try to be as direct as possible to keep the runtime down while I'm working on the Witcher games. So I think I'll leave it at that.

I enjoyed my time with Ashen and I look forward to any possible DLC it may receive—hopefully with some creative new areas, enemies, and two bosses on the level of Amiren. But I look forward even more to what these developers do next. This was a strong debut for A44 and even though asshole critics like me will pull it apart, they should be proud of this game.

Thank you for watching. The next two videos will be on Fallout 76, and a stream highlight reel of Persona 5.