Ascent of Ashes

Introduction

Ascent of Ashes drops the player into a post-apocalyptic wasteland to build and defend a colony against raiders, mutants and rival factions, in a 3D take on the RimWorld-style colony sim formula built by Vivid Storm Interactive — the studio behind RimWorld's widely used Combat Extended overhaul mod. It entered Early Access 25 July 2025 for NZ$21.99, following a long, publicly tracked development dating back to a 2022 Kickstarter campaign and a publisher relationship that fell through along the way, leaving the small team to self-fund the eventual launch. It sits at Mostly Positive today — 73.2% across 213 English-language reviews, 70.5% across its wider 302-review all-language corpus. This review reads all 57 of the game's English negative reviews in full, and the picture is consistent with what an anticipated, underfunded Early Access launch often looks like: real ambition, real bugs, and a community weighing both against each other rather than picking one story.

Genuine ambition beyond a RimWorld clone

Several reviewers with serious RimWorld experience — one citing 2,000-plus hours, another 3,000 — credit Ascent of Ashes with real, specific mechanical differentiation rather than dismissing it as a reskin. Full 3D environments and multi-level structures are the most obvious departure, but reviewers point to subtler systems too: a line-of-sight mechanic that governs both combat visibility and stealth options, limited ammunition that changes how encounters play out, and a skills and abilities system one detailed review calls better implemented than RimWorld's own. "This game could be next gen RimWorld," reads one, listing specific praised systems alongside specific complaints in the same breath — a pattern common across this review's whole sample, positive and negative alike.

Bugs severe enough to define the launch

Set against that ambition, this review's negative sample documents real, serious technical problems rather than ordinary Early Access roughness. The most damaging: a save-corruption bug that multiple reviewers describe independently, in which saving and reloading can silently break the file, costing entire sessions of progress without warning. "At some point when you save your game and some unknown bug occurs it breaks ALL SAVES," reads one review, describing losing eight hours of play this way. Colonist behaviour bugs compound the frustration — several reviewers report colonists becoming stuck and unresponsive mid-task, in some cases requiring a full restart to recover, echoing a well-known category of colony-sim bug that's particularly damaging in a genre built around trusting the simulation to keep running while you're not directly managing it.

Basic interface and onboarding gaps drew equally consistent complaints, especially in the launch-week sample: no drag-to-select for managing multiple colonists at once, no rebindable keybinds, and no in-game tutorial or guidance for a genre notorious for a steep learning curve even in its most polished entries. It's worth dating this complaint precisely rather than treating it as a permanent state: Vivid Storm shipped a dedicated Tutorial Update on 29 September 2025, roughly two months after launch, which this review's sample shows addressing at least some of the onboarding gap. Reviews dated after that update still raise missing quality-of-life features, but the specific "no tutorial at all" complaint common in the July and August reviews largely doesn't recur in later ones — a real, if partial, improvement worth crediting.

Understanding the context, without excusing the bugs

A meaningful thread running through this review's sample, on both sides of the recommendation line, concerns why the game launched in this state. Several reviewers describe knowing the studio's history well enough to explain it themselves: a publisher relationship that collapsed, forcing the small team to self-fund and release earlier than planned just to keep the project alive. "The developers got messed over by the production company and had to go it on their own," reads one review that still marks the game recommended despite acknowledging real roughness. That context shows up repeatedly enough, from reviewers with detailed knowledge of the project's history, that it reads as a genuinely informed community rather than developer-fed talking points — and it's a different situation, editorially, from a well-funded studio shipping something this rough by choice. None of that fixes the save-corruption bug for a player who loses eight hours today, and this review doesn't treat the explanation as an excuse — but it is relevant context for a reader deciding how much patience the project has earned.

A silence that worried its own community, then ended

One more specific, dateable pattern is worth flagging plainly. Vivid Storm's public progress reports ran monthly and consistently from launch through early December 2025 — then went quiet for approximately five months, with the next public update, "Version 0.2.0 Progress," not appearing until 21 May 2026. This review's negative sample shows exactly the reaction that gap would predict: reviews from that window use the word "abandonware" outright, and one from May 2026 specifically cites "four months with no updates" as the reason for requesting a refund. The gap has since ended with a public update, which this review treats as a real, positive signal against the abandonment reading — but it's worth reporting the pattern honestly rather than smoothing it into either "the devs went dark" or "nothing to worry about."

Final Verdict

Ascent of Ashes is Early Access in the fullest, most literal sense: a genuinely ambitious colony sim with real mechanical ideas RimWorld veterans specifically credit as improvements, shipped in a state severe enough that game-breaking save corruption and missing basic interface features were common, documented complaints rather than rare edge cases. The context behind that rough launch — a publisher relationship that collapsed, forcing an underfunded release — earns the developers real, visible community patience, and a September 2025 tutorial update and continued 2026 development activity suggest the project is still moving rather than abandoned, despite a worrying multi-month quiet stretch along the way. This is not a game to buy today expecting a finished or even reliably stable experience; it's one to watch, priced fairly for what it currently is, for players specifically drawn to its distinguishing 3D and tactical ideas who can tolerate real technical risk in the meantime.