Ashen

What it is

Ashen follows a lone, unnamed wanderer across a sunless fantasy world in search of a place to call home, gradually recruiting allies who populate and build a shared settlement as the player fights through hostile creatures and disaster-scarred landscapes. Developed by A44 and published by Annapurna Interactive, it launched exclusively on Epic Games Store and consoles in December 2018 before arriving on Steam a year later, on 9 December 2019, at NZD 59.99, styled visually with heavy black outlines and no on-screen HUD to reinforce its minimalist, atmospheric tone.

Its review corpus, 1,665 in English, sits at a genuinely divided Mixed 66.5% (1,107 to 558), and reading through both camps at length reveals a game whose presentation and structural ambition are widely admired even by reviewers who ultimately can't recommend the combat and cooperative systems built to carry them.

Atmosphere, exploration and town-building that earn real, consistent praise

Almost regardless of overall verdict, this corpus agrees on what Ashen gets right. "It earns enormous merits in art, visuals, sound direction and world building," writes one detailed reviewer who otherwise can't recommend the game. Exploration draws its own specific, repeated praise: "if you see it, and it looks reasonable, you can probably get to it," writes one reviewer, describing climbing to places that "werent intended" as one of their favorite parts of the experience. The town-building system — recruiting NPCs across the world who then move into and gradually construct your home settlement — is called out independently as a distinctive strength: "I really enjoyed the 'town building' aspect, as people you meet in the world move to your town and gradually fill it with beautiful buildings," one reviewer writes, even while delivering an overall negative verdict on the game surrounding it.

Combat that a large, detailed contingent calls shallow

Set against that praise, a substantial and specific critical thread targets the actual moment-to- moment combat. "Every weapon is virtually identical, every armor set (which can't be upgraded) is just 5 defense higher than the previous," writes one reviewer, a complaint echoed independently by another who notes "weapons do not progress in any way — you basically just get new skins for weapons with same stats and moves throughout the game." A separate, especially candid negative review diagnoses the deeper issue: "there's no parrying, no backstabs, pretty much no variety in movesets, levelling is mostly done passively," concluding the game amounts to "babies first soulslike" — not a dismissive insult so much as a specific claim about a mismatch between the genre's usual depth and what this particular entry delivers. Several otherwise sympathetic reviewers echo the same trajectory independently: strong first five hours, followed by a back half where "enemies are the same, exploration is very meaningless because you only loot the same consumables."

Co-op described as actively broken, not just rough

The most pointed, specific criticism in this corpus concerns cooperative play — a feature central to Ashen's own marketing. "If a player dies in a dungeon, hole [sic] party have to leave dungeon and do it all over again," one reviewer explains, while a detailed negative review goes further: if a player dies during a boss fight specifically, "they are counted as having not beat the boss and you can no longer play together until they beat the boss on their own." A separate reviewer quotes the developer's own published FAQ directly: "for multiplayer on PC, ensure that you launch Ashen via the Epic Games Store/Launcher — our matchmaking is tightly coupled with their server tech," meaning Steam-purchased co-op reportedly still routes through a different storefront's infrastructure entirely. That's an unusually concrete, checkable set of complaints about a headline feature rather than vague frustration, and it recurs across multiple independent reviews using different specific examples of the same underlying design.

The harshest complaint: backtracking after death

One of this corpus's most detailed negative reviews focuses on a single, specific mechanic: death recovery. "The backtracking in Ashen is an absolute [mess]," the reviewer writes, "if you die you will have to walk or run endlessly through mobs of enemies back to your 'souls.'" That's a souls-like staple handled, in this reviewer's telling, without the compensating shortcuts or bonfire- adjacent conveniences the genre's best examples use to keep death from becoming pure friction — a specific, mechanically grounded complaint distinct from the broader "combat is shallow" critique.

What the achievement data suggests about the drop-off

Ashen's achievement curve shows a real, fairly steep decline: the first story milestone sits at a healthy 75.4%, dropping to roughly half by the second (50.9%), and continuing a steady slide through the 20s and teens before bottoming out under 5% for the hardest DLC-tied content. That's consistent with the reviewer pattern of strong early impressions souring over a longer playthrough — a meaningful share of buyers experience enough of the game to form the "first five hours are great" opinion so many reviews share, without necessarily pushing through to see whether the back half's described repetition changes their mind.

A defense worth taking seriously

It's fair to include the corpus's counterargument directly: "I think the biggest reason for Ashen not receiving a very positive rating is that people tend to lament over the things the game doesn't offer instead of appreciating what it does," argues one detailed positive review, specifically praising the climbing and parkour-style exploration as something "which other souls-like don't" offer. That's a reasonable framing for a game whose reputation clearly rests on being judged against Dark Souls- adjacent expectations it was never entirely trying to meet — reviewers who approach it as its own thing, prioritizing atmosphere and exploration over combat depth, consistently report a more positive experience than those expecting a combat-first souls-like.

Verdict

Ashen backs up a genuinely striking art style and an unusually thoughtful town-building hook with combat and cooperative systems that a large, detailed share of its own player base says don't hold up — shallow weapon variety, a punishing and unrewarding death-recovery loop, and a co-op implementation with specific, well-documented failures at exactly the moments it's supposed to shine. Worth experiencing for its atmosphere and exploration on a discount, but not a game to buy specifically for its advertised cooperative multiplayer.