ASHGARD: Infinity Mask

ASHGARD: Infinity Mask is a third-person action-adventure combining souls-lite combat, platforming, and exploration, set in a post-Ragnarök world drawn from Norse mythology. Players take the role of Embla, an android with a human soul, awakened with no memory on a scrapyard and tasked with piecing together her identity. Developed and published by ASHGARD GAMES, it entered Early Access on 27 March 2026 at $9.99. This review's sample finds a genuinely promising, well-supported project with the rough edges expected of an early Early Access build, most notably around pacing and performance.

More polish than expected for this stage

What stands out first in this review's sample is how much attention the game's accessibility and options suite has already received. One detailed reviewer listed camera smoothing, axis inversion, motion blur and depth-of-field toggles, hold-to-sprint options, and extensive sound and graphics settings, writing plainly that "even some AAA games at a much higher price point fail to deliver those really important things." The same reviewer praised the tutorial's "already fun little exploration detours" and called level design "a strength here," adding that four difficulty options — from Story Mode to Nightmare — give the souls-lite combat real flexibility for different kinds of players. That's an unusually complete foundation for a title only weeks into Early Access, and this review's sample treats it as a meaningful signal of the small team's ambition and care.

A tutorial that overstays its welcome

Set against that praise is a specific, well-documented complaint about pacing. This review's only available English-language negative review reports that the junkyard tutorial sequence took roughly 30 minutes to complete before reaching the first boss — "far longer," the reviewer writes, "than what I actually learned, which was to swing a sword, shoot a crossbow, block, and dodge roll." That timing lines up directly with Steam's own achievement data: the game's ACH_BOSS_1 achievement, tied to defeating that first boss, sits at 38.6% completion, a meaningful drop from the earlier tutorial-stage achievements (90.1%, 78.8%, 73.2%) that precede it — concrete evidence that a real share of players don't make it through the opening stretch before dropping off, consistent with the negative review's specific complaint about the tutorial's length relative to its actual teaching content.

Combat feel: promising but inconsistent

Combat draws a mixed but specific set of reactions. The negative reviewer described the shield as "extremely clunky, slow to draw," and reported the tutorial-taught parry mechanic simply wouldn't register consistently, while flagging archer enemies as "annoying" rather than threatening due to their positioning on ledges and rapid fire rate. A more positive account offset this somewhat, noting combat "borrows from souls-likes but feels more arcady and action-rpg-like," while acknowledging "Ashgard needs more polishing for sure." That range of reactions — some players finding the fundamentals sound, others finding specific mechanics disjointed — is a reasonable thing to expect from a souls-lite this early in Early Access, but worth flagging plainly for buyers expecting tight, responsive combat out of the gate.

A refund, and a linearity surprise

Two specific complaints in this review's sample deserve direct mention rather than folding into general "still rough" language. One reviewer explicitly refunded the game over performance, writing "it's not running well in terms of performance," while still crediting "nice visuals, good soundtrack and averagely decent combat" and stating an intent to revisit in a few months. Separately, the negative reviewer's stated "quit moment" came from a structural surprise: after a cutscene explicitly teasing open-world traversal — wingsuit gliding, wide vistas to explore — the game immediately forced a linear follow-the-NPC sequence the moment player control resumed, blocking an obviously intended side path. That's a specific pacing and expectation-setting problem worth knowing about separately from bugs or performance, since it speaks to how the game currently paces its promised open-world structure rather than to technical rough edges.

A developer moving fast

What tempers these complaints is ASHGARD GAMES' visible commitment to rapid iteration. Six separate update posts landed in the first two weeks after Early Access launch, addressing collision bugs, quest-completion issues, loot visibility, and a "critical bug related to Karn causing unexpected behavior," among others. One patch specifically confirmed "players can now block all attacks" and adjusted critical-hit stamina costs — direct responses to the kind of combat-feel complaints raised above. A later update rebalanced the game's first major boss fight and added new content to the Yggdrasil area. One reviewer specifically credited this pace directly: "the developers respond quick to kriticks and they also fix things pretty fast," adding that difficulty customization had already improved noticeably since their first attempt.

Setting and reach

Embla's story draws directly from Norse mythology's post-Ragnarök framing, and the store page's own pitch leans into that specificity: she's described as an "Androm," a hybrid of machine and human soul, awakened without memory and gradually piecing together both her own identity and the shattered world around her. That framing gives the game's setting a clearer point of view than a generic post-apocalyptic backdrop, and it lines up with the positive sample's praise for distinctive NPC designs and a Biomutant-adjacent atmosphere. Language support currently covers English and German, both with full voice audio — a reasonable scope for a small studio still mid-development, though it leaves non-German-speaking international players with text-only options for now.

Verdict

ASHGARD: Infinity Mask is a genuinely promising Early Access souls-lite, with atmosphere, level design, and an accessibility suite well ahead of where many titles are at this stage of development. Its problems — a tutorial that runs longer than its actual teaching content, inconsistent combat feel, and real performance issues that have already cost at least one sale — are the kind of rough edges Early Access exists to surface and fix, and this review's sample suggests ASHGARD GAMES is doing exactly that at a genuinely fast pace. This is a reasonable buy now for souls-like fans willing to accept Early Access instability, and one worth revisiting as the promised open-world structure and combat polish continue to develop.