Ashen Reviews

The fighting mechanics are completely f***ed up. No fun at all.

i played this for three hours, didn't like it, didn't touch it again for four years, tried it again and still didn't like it

Great fun game. Multiplayer works and is great.

I really enjoyed this, this like a simplified much more mellow dark souls. its like if lofi was a souls game. very chill play through does get intense at times, i think only to remind you of how mellow the other areas are. I love the lighting and atmosphere. all of the characters and the world feel like they were sculpted out of clay. ahh yeah good game., great job.

I played through this with a friend and had a blast. Ashen is lean compared to other souls-likes, but full of content. In particular, the level design is a blast to explore and find all the hidden nooks, crannies, and sapient roots (hehe). This is an excellent co-op experience, especially for fans of the souls-like genre.

Pretty good game, the world is amazing and the story and characters are extremely well written. Gameplay wise it could have been better, very few weapons and armors that are actually useful and the progression is very limited. The coop option tho makes it much much better, if you have a friend to play it with, then it's a must buy

I can't speak on anything outside of my own single player playthrough, but I enjoyed the game a lot. The core combat works perfectly fine even if it isn't particularly great, and the overworld and dungeon level design has some moments where it shines very brightly. However, I can't recommend this game without caveats because the devs chose to make the enemies have quite a lot of health, deal a lot of damage, and exist in pretty high numbers sometimes. I assume this is meant to be balanced around co-op or the AI companions, but when the companion does do a bad job at this, the difficulty and the problems around it (repetitive mechanics, long runbacks, unmanageable enemy counts) become a real chore. Much like Dark Souls, this game has some surprising highs and some lows that make me question what the devs where possibly thinking. All in all, I would heartily recommend Ashen when it is discounted, to those who really appreciate Dark Souls and Demon's Souls style dungeon crawling and world exploration.

Ashen is a tricky game to review. On one hand it is an enjoyable experience and the world is pretty interesting. Characters are well designed and the story is simple yet pretty good. On the other hand I dislike a lot of the game play (it is a video game after all). The way you level your character or lack there of. There is not really any diversity in how you can build your character (other than the very limited weapon and armor selection and "runes" you can use to make SMALL tweaks). The combat is just okay. A lot of the enemies are a bit repetitive and the attacks are not the best telegraphed. Ranged enemies can be annoying more than challenging and the bosses are kinda lack luster in their design. The missions are kinda fetch-quest centered and can be kinda uninteresting. I found myself about half way into the game telling myself "I am sure it will get better" and it did get a bit better...but not a whole lot. I was excited to play Ashen even with it sitting at Mixed reviews. The art style looks great and it looked like an interesting souls-like. I just think the game play can feel a bit repetitive and that really hurts the game. I found myself just wanting to finish it instead of just enjoying the game as I played. The final boss was the nail in the coffin for me. The attacks were not really well telegraphed and they dodge a lot...and I mean a lot of your attacks. It becomes annoying and frustrating how often they are running away from you. [spoiler] The second phase of the last boss fight is also kinda boring and can be annoying as well with a lot of running away [/spoiler]. Plus, if you die it is also a run back through an entire area with strong enemies (Hint: although if you clear it and run back to the ritual stone you can refill your heals and head back through without fighting enemies...it just takes a lot of time to do so). I would not even characterize the game as a difficult souls-like really. I mean it can be challenging yes but a lot of the enemies become annoying instead of challenging or difficult. That is what it came down to for me. I was going to recommend the game even with the flaws and if I could say "mixed" I would but I get yes or no...so it has to be a no. It has positives and a lot of people enjoy playing it and I think that is great! My feelings are mixed just like the reviews on steam. If you are still interested then buy it at a steep discount like I did, but probably stay away at full price. It sucks to not recommend it because I wanted it to be really good and it just ended up being kinda meh.

Really enjoyed and highly recommend! The game gets a little same-y by the end, but it's such a competent souls-like game and the coop, while a little finnicky, worked well :)

I bought this game a long time ago, played it for a few hours then, and then put it down. I remembered it today, and gave it another try. It reminded me why I didn't want to play this game. This game has enough frustrating elements that I just don't really see myself wanting to play it. The visuals are cool and the combat feels familiar if you've played Dark Souls- but something about it just feels slightly off to me. Not so far off that it's devoid of fun, but more like it just slowly builds frustration. At least that's how I felt. I think this is due to the fact that enemies are scattered everywhere, will frequently surprise attack you, and gang up on you (think 3-7 enemies at once. You do have an AI companion, but they can die and are not always very helpful- still better than not having them though). This would be fine if the game was more generous with save points, but the checkpoints somehow feel very far apart. Not to mention, this game borrows the Dark Souls mechanic where you lose your currency when you die and have to go back and pick it up. It felt really novel and exciting to me when I first played Dark Souls, and for someone who hasn't played those games it might feel that way in Ashen too! But for me, I just feel tired of that mechanic after playing so much of Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Demon's Souls, and Elden Ring. It doesn't add excitement for me anymore, it just makes me a bit frustrated. Maybe that's just me not being in the right head space for this type of game. The game also has an interesting world structure, which feels kind of like a mini open world. I don't know how large or long the game is because I only played it for a few hours, but from what I did play it seems like there are several small, self contained zones with paths connecting them. The lack of loading screens makes it feel like an open world game, but the lack of good mobility options and sheer volume of enemies waiting to ambush you, and lack of meaningful or interesting things to find in the map other than enemies stops it from feeling like a true open world game to me. You have a jump button and can climb small ledges, but I frequently got frustrated trying to climb things and just sliding off or not even gaining any height. With the way the game's combat encounters are designed, I would probably like it more if it was a much more linear game/story with frequent checkpoints and a sense of forward momentum and direction. The lantern mechanic feels kinda cool to me: you can drop your lantern somewhere to light up an area and then pick it back up later when you need it, or otherwise carry it in your left hand while moving around. It's a fairly cool way to emphasize darkness as an aspect of exploration, and the atmosphere can definitely be scary or unsettling at times. However, I question why you can't attach the lantern to your belt and use a two handed weapon while running around in the dark. I don't hate that you can't, but I wish that you could. The graphics are simultaneously very cool and stylized, yet also feel somewhat lifeless to me. Maybe it's the lack of faces. Maybe it's the lack of saturation. In any case, it's not a world I really want to be in. The exception is there was one moment of spectacle that was very cool to me, when a giant person rose from a chasm right in front of me. That was impressive feeling and enhanced the magical feeling of the world. But generally, my time in the game felt like somewhat aimless wandering, fighting vague bandit type enemies and the occasion creepy spider or wolf-like creature. My other problem with the combat is just how far the enemies can move when they are dodging or approaching you for an attack. It makes actually catching up to and hitting the enemies feel very difficult, which I'm sure is intentional, but it made combat a bit frustrating to me. The number of items I picked up and didn't know what to do with was fairly high, and yet I could also see that the inventory size was pretty small. That didn't become a problem for me in the time I played, but it made me concerned, as I don't like inventory management very much. And the characters seemed kind of interesting, but... I think without faces, I just had a hard time latching onto them. I don't think I can recommend this game in general. It might get better later on, and what I played had cool elements, but it wasn't for me. I had a sinking feeling that I had already experienced the majority of what the game would feel like, and it just wasn't fun enough to keep me for the whole experience.