Ashen – charming, beautiful and very, very hard

If it weren’t for how charming and lovingly crafted Ashen is, the amount of mechanics it borrows from the Dark Souls series would be nigh-unforgivable. From the combat to the encounters and progression system, Ashen pilfers a cheeky amount of content from the iconic series. Clearly, all genres have to begin with obvious plagiarism, but it is weird seeing it happen in real-time.

While Ashen’s ‘ light vs. dark’ storyline is rather pastiche and somewhat forgettable, it is the presentation that will steal your heart. The cinematography is often breathtaking and the sense of scale imparted by the game elevates Ashen to the realm of modern classics.

To its credit, Ashen captures the ‘feeling’ of the Dark Souls combat perfectly. Weighty and rewarding of carefully timed attacks, the combat is just as punishing and unforgiving of haphazard players as the Dark Souls series.

One of the key ways that Ashen diverges from the Souls games is in the layout of the world. Where Dark Souls can often feel cloustraphobic and asphyxiating in its maze-like layout, Ashen feels far more welcoming and open. There are even moments of jaw-dropping scale and grandeur, such as exiting the mouth of a crumbling cave only to be greeted by a glowing golden city that sweeps out past the horizon.

Your home base, Vagrant’s Rest, is also rather impressive, though not in terms of scale but in how it shifts dynamically throughout your progression through the game. Shortly after the beginning of the game you will set up camp in the woods. As you progress and reccruit more people to your cause, the camp becomes a town full of residents. Trade and upgrades will follow, thoroughly imbueing a sense of purpose and reward to your exploits, from both story and progression points-of-view.

Where Ashen’s open environments are the perfect foil to this quirky Souls clone, its the dungeons that let it down a tad. Dark Souls feels difficult but there is a certain methodology to each encounter that becomes apparent relatively quickly. The encounters in Ashen’s dungeons often feel a little cheap, resulting in you dying in ways that offer up little cues as to the patterns required to progress. The lack of game-saving ritual stones before the boss fights at the end of dungeons is rather annoying as well.

Ashen is charming, beautiful and very, very hard. A worthy homage to one of the greatest series every realeased in gaming and also well able to stand up on its own merits.