Ashen is about exploring and cleansing a newly radiant world, but
it's often at its best in the dark. A few hours into this derivative but
engrossing third-person RPG, there's a quest that takes you deep below
ground in search of a corrupted giantess queen. Entering her realm is an
ordeal - the nearby hills are alive with other giants who are fond of
leaping on your head, to say nothing of coyote-type predators that
breath fire - but the catacombs themselves are something else.
The surface world's packs of club-wielding vagrants give way, here,
to more treacherous breeds of foe. Skeletons who lunge from their dust
as you pass (in a masterful bit of risk-reward design, you can shatter
them with one blow if you catch them mid-resurrection), and wraiths who
evaporate on contact only to pounce from the blackness. Wall-crawlers
with peeled-open chests who lurk below ledges, popping up behind you
with an easily-missed slither of flesh. All these violent delights plus
yet more giants, silhouetted near corridor mouths or looming in the
stark but short-ranged glare of your lantern - unhelpfully, given the
perils of dodging with deadfalls to either side, you can't hold the
latter and a shield at the same time. It took me a couple hours to
bumble through that wondrous nightmare to the cavern at the area's base,
where the abundance of space felt positively decadent. It's probably
the finest dungeon environment I've set foot in this year. Top tip: you can actually put down the lantern without extinguishing it if you want to equip your shield during a battle.
For all that, Ashen is also often at its best in the
light. There's another area later on that is much less clever but
similarly oppressive, not least for its population of spear-chucking
cultists. Survive it and you're treated to a glorious vista of a fallen
city, inspired (to my untrained eye) by Mughal architecture - bronze
domes catching the daybreak above pastel pink cobbles and demolished
houses. The nature and timing of this spectacle immediately recall Anor
Londo, the heavenly city of Dark Souls, much as the queen's realm feels
like a mishmash of the latter's Catacombs and Tomb of the Giants. Ashen
owes an awful lot to From Software's work - to pick out the most obvious
mechanical debts, all your XP is dropped in a puddle on death, and
landscapes are woven around runestones where you can meditate
cross-legged to refill your healing gourd, at the price of reviving all
the enemies you've slain. It's essentially a cleaned-up cover version,
though its art direction and scanty multiplayer elements have more in
common with Journey. But if it never really surprises, and lacks the
scale and elusiveness of its inspirations, Ashen is elegant and
demanding enough to stand on its own feet.
The eponymous Ashen is a massive bird whose luminous plumage
supplies the game's world with a sun. As the story begins the creature
has been dead for many years, its skull lolling over the horizon like a
crashed starship, but its resurrection is at hand. Your task is to purge
the various evils who have festered over decades of night, from
malicious spirits underground to the bandit tribes and giants who roam
the wastes. In the process you'll also found a settlement, as characters
you meet return to the starting area and build dwellings, smithies and
breweries while you're off clobbering nasties. If the function of the
village is to let you tweak and upgrade your equipment while unlocking
sidequests that further expand your crafting options, the pleasure of it
is watching the community grow. In the course of 20 hours or so,
patches of broken stone give way to floorboards and tapestries,
scaffolds to peaked roofs, and the soundscape fills with the clatter and
murmur of everyday existence. The game's dialogue is very exposition-driven, and the
voice-acting rather hammy - it sometimes feels like everybody is on loan
from Destiny - but it's a joy to listen to your townsfolk at work.
It's a lovely creation, that village, a diorama evolving in
stop-motion, and the landscapes beyond are no less ravishing. There are
citadels engulfed in soot, canyons choked with rope bridges and a
battered coastal fortress with a frost-breathing behemoth perched atop
it. The layouts follow the broad Souls principle of long stretches of
claustrophobia followed by breathless, dazzling openness, and the game
is fond, too, of showing you how far you've travelled, with certain
landmarks visible almost everywhere in the world. It is, however,
relatively linear of structure, a wide S-shaped corridor chopped up into
regions with their own distinct ambience and hazards. Sometimes the
critical path shoots out a limb - an initially forbidding cave near your
village, for example, where you'll prise rare resources from the claws
of wraiths - and there's some doubling-back to do once you acquire a
certain ability. But there's seldom that quintessentially Soulsy elation
when you realise a sidepath actually links back to a familiar location,
and in any case, there are waypoints and a map to help you navigate.
It's closer to Journey - an influence also tangible in the glee of
sliding down sand dunes - in that as dizzying as your surroundings may
appear, you're seldom in doubt about where to go.
Similar things can be said about the stripped-down combat and
character development. There are no character stats to manage save for
health and stamina, which are raised by completing specific quests and
finding certain items. Weapons can be upgraded ad nauseam, but there's
no scaling of weapon strength by character stat, and no myriad of
elemental strengths or impact types - just the choice of damage dealt,
stagger potential and chance of a critical hit. You can equip two at
once, a one-handed weapon for quick attacks and a two-hander for
skull-splitting finishers, plus a shield and throwing spears. It's the
Souls progression path boiled back to the marrow, and while I'd have
appreciated a wider range of character builds, Ashen's relative
shortness means you don't really have time to get bored. For those in
search of more flavour, Talismans and Relics serve as eccentric
character modifiers. One causes wings to grow from your back, increasing
your XP gain per kill till the wings are fully grown, whereupon they'll
reflect a portion of damage back at your attacker. Others let you hit
harder when you strike from behind, or increase your health the further
you travel from the village. As in Souls, each named side character is on their own
journey through the world, but where Souls left their movements opaque,
here everything is made plain in quest descriptions.
Combat itself hinges on managing your stamina: you'll need plenty
of juice to dodge, block and swing, and running out often leads to a
sticky end. The animations are elegant if a touch robotic, and there are
plenty of visual and audible cues to help you read the flow of each
duel. Beyond the basics of probing for gaps in animation patterns,
victory is about memorising each enemy's spawn location and the
proximity at which you'll rile it. Initially, you'll stumble from one
ambush to the next, galloping towards a lone vagrant by a campfire only
to discover that there are three more in the underbrush. Gradually,
you'll learn the value of caution and deviousness, baiting the elites
away from or into chokepoints with thrown spears, and spinning the
camera as you approach each corner to peek behind it.
That's when your allies permit this, anyway. Ashen is a lot easier
than it perhaps should be because you're always accompanied by one of
your villagers, each armed with their own gear, healing gourd and the
ability to revive you. While slightly prone to strolling into pits, the
AI is very capable in a brawl; it also knows each area's layout in
advance, zipping along paths you can't even see to steamroll enemies
you've barely noticed. The result is that you're occasionally denied the
chance to really put the combat mechanics through their paces. The AI
does generally let you make the first move, but I've won too many fights
by kicking the wasp's nest and putting up token resistance while the
computer channels its inner Legolas.
You can, in fairness, find a Relic that lets you wander alone, and
there's an additional twist: your ally may in fact be another player,
slyly introduced via background matchmaking. I wasn't able to infiltrate
anybody's game or be infiltrated in turn during my playthrough, but
then again, there don't seem to be any explicit signs that other players
are present. For all I know I've had human company throughout. It lends
a certain existential undercurrent to the game's character design, with
faces left eerily featureless save for the odd touch of beard, as
though everybody had evolved to live without eyes and mouths over the
centuries of darkness. The game takes its cue again from Journey here,
but in lumbering you with an ally throughout, it spoils the latter's
sense of mystery. Part of the reason Journey's multiplayer encounters
are so strange and compelling, after all, is that you aren't paired with
anybody by default. The effects of Talismans and Relics aside, your defence is raised by finding armour sets, which can't be upgraded.
Mystery, I think, is Ashen's missing link. The concept of a realm
recently lifted from apocalypse is majestically played out in the
environments, but undercut by dialogue, quest and item descriptions that
want to explain rather than tantalise. The writing has colour (and an
exciting range of accents) but the delivery is generic - this is one of
those fantasy RPGs where every weapon comes with a quote from a cast
member, like “this axe chops stuff real good”. In general, Ashen is so
in love with the enigmatic workings of From and Thatgamecompany's
creations that it neglects to kindle enigmas of its own. Still, it's a
robust and often mesmerising piece of craftsmanship that serves as a
gentle introduction to the Souls subgenre, though it's definitely no
substitute for Journey. And for a veteran of Lordran, there's genuine
satisfaction to unravelling its reinventions and departures -
identifying the places where it sheds a little more light on Souls at
large, and the places where it lets the darkness close in.
0 Comments