Ashen

Every souls-like since 2011 has been graded on a curve of its own making. Match FromSoftware’s weight and timing or don’t bother. Ashen, from the Wellington-based studio A44 and published by Annapurna Interactive, is the rare imitator that opted out of that test entirely — it went looking for something FromSoftware never built, found it, and then shipped a game that can’t quite carry what it discovered.

The setup is elegant. The Ashen was a giant creature whose death plunged the world into permanent dark; its periodic rebirth returns light for a moment before the black rolls back in. You are a wanderer with no fixed address, which in this game is the actual thesis rather than a framing device. The story was developed with fantasy novelist Mark Lawrence, whose fingerprints show up less in dialogue than in the bleakness of the premise — a world where the greatest ambition available to a person is a roof and a neighbor. Foreign Fields handles the score, and it is doing real work, all low strings and held breath.

Ashen’s market position has always been awkward, and that matters to how it was received. It arrived on Steam and Nintendo Switch on December 9, 2019, at $39.99, years into a souls-like boom, as a paid game asking full price for a smaller-scale take. Critics landed at a Metacritic of 81, treating it as a strong entry in a crowded genre, while the player conversation has consistently centered on the combat feel and the technical state of the PC build.

That gap between press and players isn’t a mystery. Critics graded the ideas. Players graded the hit detection.

• Passive drop-in co-op: Another player — or an AI companion when nobody’s available — is always with you. No lobbies, no menus, no invite flow. They appear as a silhouetted stranger, fight, revive you, and wander off. It is the single most interesting structural idea in the game.
• Vagrant’s Rest: Progression is routed through a settlement, not a skill tree. You find survivors in the world, bring them home, and each one unlocks crafting, weapon and gear upgrades, side quests, or talismans that reshape your build.
• Stamina-gated, deliberate combat: Light and heavy attacks, dodges, blocks, parries, across two-handers, spears, hammers and shields. Reckless aggression gets punished, as the genre demands.
• Hand-painted, faceless art direction: Characters have no features. It should read as a shortcut. It reads as a style — and one that ages far better than the photoreal competition.
• Varied exploration: Bogs, fjords, caves, catacombs, ruined palaces, environmental puzzles, and large-scale boss encounters spread across a genuinely handsome world.

The Co-op Is the Game

Start here, because everything else in Ashen is downstream of it.

Multiplayer in this genre is a negotiation. You put down a sign, you wait, you get summoned, you’re in someone else’s world under someone else’s rules, and the moment the boss dies you’re evicted. It’s transactional by design. Ashen throws the whole apparatus out. Someone is simply there. You crest a ridge and a shape is fighting a thing in the grass below you and you go help, and neither of you has typed a word or touched a menu.

The design consequence is enormous. Because the game can’t know whether your companion is a competent human or the AI, it can’t tune encounters around coordination — so it tunes them around presence. You are never alone, so the loneliness of the world has to come from the writing and the art rather than the mechanics. That’s a bolder bet than it sounds, and it mostly pays off. The silhouette next to you is a stranger in the truest sense: no name, no face, no voice, no way to communicate beyond gesture and behavior. A system built so that an anonymous player figures out you want to go that way, and follows, is designed to produce a specific warmth almost nothing else in games generates.

The AI companion is the weak link. On paper it’s serviceable — it aggros, it revives, it can land a hit that matters — but the design gives it the tactical judgment of a golden retriever, and in tight boss arenas it functions mostly as a distraction dispenser. The system is built for a human. That’s a problem for a game of this age with a thinner multiplayer pool than it launched with, and it should be factored in.

The Settlement Loop

Vagrant’s Rest is the second good idea. Rather than abstracting progression into souls-and-stats, Ashen makes advancement visible. Find a blacksmith, and there is now a forge where there wasn’t one. Find a healer, and a building goes up. Your character sheet is a town.

It’s motivating in a way numbers aren’t, and it reframes exploration: you’re not scouring a bog for a stat boost, you’re recruiting. The talismans do the heavy lifting on build variety, and they’re the closest thing here to genuine mechanical depth — swapping them meaningfully changes how you approach a fight.

Where the loop strains is content density. The quests that open up are mostly fetch-and-return errands with a few lines of flavor, and the writing rarely rises to Lawrence’s premise. The town grows; the people in it stay thin. The budget shows.

Combat: The Part That Doesn’t Land

Here’s the honest assessment, and it’s the core of the case against the game.

Ashen’s combat has the shape of a souls-like without the feel. The animations read correctly. The stamina economy is sensible. The enemies telegraph. But the design of the connection between input and impact is mushy — hits are built to register a beat late, weapons are tuned to pass through bodies with insufficient resistance, and the hitboxes are generous in ways that cut both directions. In a genre where the entire pleasure is precision, “floaty” is not a minor complaint. It’s a structural failure.

The camera compounds it. In open ground it’s fine. Push into a catacomb corridor or a narrow ruin with two enemies and a lock-on target and it’s built in a way that fights you actively, clipping into geometry and losing the thing you’re trying to kill. Deaths that should be the player’s fault become the camera’s fault, and that distinction is the difference between a punishing game and an unfair one.

Enemy variety is the third strike. The bestiary repeats early and often, and by the midgame nearly every moveset in the game has been internalized. The bosses are the highlight — big, well-staged, occasionally spectacular — but the connective tissue between them is worn thin.

None of this makes Ashen bad. It makes it a game whose best ideas sit on top of a foundation that isn’t strong enough to hold them.

The art direction is the least arguable thing here. Those blank, featureless faces should feel cheap and instead they feel deliberate — abstraction as mood rather than as savings. Combined with the hand-painted textures and a lighting model built around a world that is nearly always dark, Ashen has an identity that most of its better-funded peers lack. The fjords are legitimately beautiful. The moment the Ashen’s light returns is one of the best-directed visual beats in any game this size.

The technical execution does not match. The PC port is under-optimized — a stamina-timed action game built without the frame consistency its dodge windows demand, and with a stability record rough enough to be a theme rather than an anomaly. A hitch during a dodge window is not a cosmetic issue; it directly costs runs. That’s the through-line in the negative player response, and it’s fair.

The UI is clean, quiet, and gets out of the way. Credit where it’s due.

Steam is the version with the most horsepower available and the most disappointing use of it. Expect to spend time in the settings before getting stable frames, and even then the stutter is engine-level rather than hardware-level — a faster GPU reduces the problem without eliminating it. Play it on a controller. The mouse-and-keyboard mapping works, but a lock-on stamina brawler is a stick game and pretending otherwise costs you.

Nintendo Switch trades fidelity for consistency, and the trade is smarter than it looks. Resolution and effects take a visible hit, and the dark palette does the port a real favor in handheld — a lot of the compromise disappears on a small screen. Undocked, Ashen is an unusually good fit: deliberate pacing, short traversal loops, a soundtrack built for headphones. The cost is the co-op. Passive multiplayer needs a populated matchmaking pool, and on Switch the odds of riding with the AI companion are high, which strips out the best thing the game does. That’s the calculus: Steam for the co-op and the resolution, Switch for the comfort and the stability.

Ashen is the most instructive kind of flawed game — one that failed forward. A44 looked at the most calcified convention in the genre, the summon-sign ritual, and replaced it with something warmer and more human. Passive co-op should have been copied by everyone. It mostly wasn’t, and that’s the industry’s loss.

But an idea that good deserved a better chassis. The combat doesn’t have the tactile authority the genre runs on, the camera is an active antagonist, and the PC build shipped in a state that soured the audience most inclined to champion it. The Metacritic 81 isn’t wrong — it’s critics grading the ideas from a distance the execution doesn’t survive up close. Both readings describe the same game.

We rate it a Mixed 6 out of 10 in spirit: recommend it only to the co-op-curious and the art-direction faithful, and only at a discount. Pay attention to what the co-op is doing. There’s a better game buried in here, and A44 went on to build toward it in Flintlock. Ashen is the sketch — rough, smudged, and more interesting than a lot of finished paintings.