Post Script
Company’s all well and good, but sometimes you just want to be alone
Early on in Ashen, you’ve given a piece of wisdom by Bataran, the big (mostly) friendly giant who provides your induction to the world: “To walk alone in the darkness is to walk in the company of death.” And lo, there was co-op.
At the outset, your AI partner picks up the role of guide from Bataran. This is how a fight tends to go, they implicitly say, and this is a good time to chug from your Gourd. Eventually, though, they hand over to a real human player, who generally has less interest in helping you learn anything. There’s no voice chat, or any way of communicating beyond a single ‘beckon’ command – which, together with the choice never to announce when your game connects with another, recalls Journey’s enigmatic approach to co-op. And because they appear in the guise of your current NPC partner, you’re left to deduce whether the person stood by your side is sitting in a distant room merely by recognising human behaviour in all its erratic glory.
They might start sprinting ahead, or smashing every pot in sight or, if they are (for example) playing the game in order to review it, inexplicably jumping all the time as they wrestle with Xbox One’s terrible screenshot function. There have been reports of players abandoning one another to pursue their own goals, but this was rarely our experience, and Ashen does everything it can to discourage this behaviour. There are spots you can climb to only when a companion gives you a leg-up, and dungeon doors that require two pairs of hands to open. Perhaps most importantly, sticking with your partner gives you a second chance at life, as death in combat causes you to fall to your knees, all nearby enemies politely leaving you alone as you await revival.
It’s a well-implemented system. In particular, combat is much more enjoyable with a human partner. Where NPCs can discourage you from engaging in fights, the rhythm of Ashen’s combat starts to make more sense when you’re working together with a fellow player. You land a hit, step back while your stamina bar recharges, letting them get in a few blows, then rinse and repeat.
Co-op is, it’s worth noting, optional. The multiplayer menu offers a filter setting, which can be used to ensure you’re only partnered with friends who have input the same code – or you can just turn it off altogether. You can choose to only play with AI companions, or none at all. Those two-person dungeon doors can be circumvented by slotting a specific item into your inventory of skills.
This decision feels telling. The companion system is the furthest Ashen ever strays from the blueprint laid out by Dark Souls, and the option to simply lift the feature out suggests a lack of confidence in it. It’s an indication that Aurora44 can see how its implementation of cooperative play struggles to mesh with the concepts it’s borrowing.
It’s more intangible than the mechanics or level design, but one of the key things that most Soulslikes have in common is a sense of being utterly alone in a hostile world. Even the games that have tested the elastic limit of the formula much further than Ashen, such as Hollow Knight, which splices it with a 2D Metroidvania, retain this essential solitude. In Ashen, this isn’t the case. The presence of a partner affects the difficulty level, yes, but it also erodes the other things which make Souls games seem harder than they perhaps are – feeling lost, overwhelmed, intimidated by the unknown.
When you encounter a player in those games, whether they are summoned friend or unwanted foe, it’s impactful because of the contrast. The same is true of Journey’s fellow traveller. When you’re constantly chaperoned, though, those moments of human connection aren’t rare, or precious, or even especially meaningful. Walking alone in the darkness, in the company of death, is rather the point of these games, and a huge part of their allure.