Of Ash and Steel

A debut studio chasing a very specific old-school feeling

Of Ash and Steel is the debut release from Fire & Frost, a small studio publishing through tinyBuild, and it launched on 24 November 2025 following a pre-launch delay. Its pitch is unambiguous about its influences: a third-person, open-world action RPG following Tristan, a weak, unremarkable protagonist thrown into the Kingdom of the Seven, built around 45-plus hours of main story, two major factions with their own quests and rewards, and a combat system with three distinct stances and multiple weapon types layered over a stamina-management core. Reviewers across the entire spectrum of the game's Steam reception — positive and negative alike — reach for the same comparison almost immediately: Gothic and Risen, the early-2000s German RPG lineage built around unforgiving, unmarked open worlds rather than modern quest-marker convenience. That's a specific, narrow target for a debut studio to aim at, and the review corpus suggests Fire & Frost hit it closely enough that the comparison isn't just marketing.

What actually delivers on that promise

The strongest, most consistent praise in Of Ash and Steel's review base comes from players describing exactly the experience that comparison implies. No starting map, no quest markers, no fast travel handed to the player from the outset — reviewers repeatedly describe genuine disorientation giving way to genuine reward as they map the island's geography themselves, lean on vantage points and terrain to fight enemies stronger than their starting character, and gradually build Tristan into whichever combination of combat, crafting, thievery or alchemy they choose. One reviewer in their fifties, citing a personal history running from Ultima through Elder Scrolls, Gothic and Risen, specifically credits the deliberate absence of modern navigational aids with making exploration feel meaningful again, rather than a checklist to clear as efficiently as possible. Several of the most detailed positive reviews carry playtimes well past 100 hours — one past 270 — a strong signal that whatever the game gets right, it's enough to hold a genre-loyal audience's attention for a very long time.

The faction and profession systems back that up with real structural depth. Choosing between the Order and the Free Hunters, alongside smaller factions like Smugglers, Graverobbers and Bounty Hunters, shapes both the story path and the specific rewards available, and a wide profession list covering fishing, hunting, blacksmithing — including forging a personalised signature weapon — and alchemy gives progression genuine breadth rather than funnelling every player toward the same combat build. Voice acting draws specific, repeated praise even from otherwise critical reviewers, several of whom describe listening to full dialogue exchanges rather than skipping through them, an unusual compliment for a game more commonly praised for its systems than its writing.

The bug pattern that keeps recurring

Set against that praise is a specific, detailed and repeated bug pattern that shows up across a large share of the negative review corpus, often from reviewers who explicitly say they wanted to recommend the game. Quest items vanishing from inventories, or failing to spawn in the world at all, is the single most consistent complaint — several reviewers describe main-quest progression blocked outright as a result, including detailed accounts from players 80, 100 and even over 100 hours deep who report being stuck with no way forward. One reviewer states plainly that crossbows are entirely non-functional at launch, equippable but unable to fire, a specific and unusually concrete technical failure rather than a vague balance complaint. Crashes, corrupted saves, and auto-saves that load a player back into an earlier state with no inventory or NPCs present round out a picture that a meaningful share of the review corpus describes not as ordinary jank, but as evidence the game shipped before it was actually finished.

A punishing crime-and-detection system compounds the frustration for some players specifically: committing a crime while apparently unseen still results in guards knowing and demanding fines an early-game character has no realistic way to pay, a design choice several reviewers argue crosses from "unforgiving, Gothic-style realism" into simply unfair. Quest writing and navigation draw a related but distinct complaint — reviewers who are otherwise sympathetic to the no-hand-holding philosophy still describe environmental and dialogue direction as too vague even by that standard, arguing that a game built around player-driven exploration needs unusually clear in-world clues to make that exploration solvable, and that Of Ash and Steel doesn't consistently provide them.

A studio's ambition outrunning its testing, and early signs of recovery

It's worth reading these two threads together rather than as a simple contradiction. Fire & Frost is a small, debut studio that set out to build a genuinely large open-world RPG with faction choice, deep crafting, and a combat system with real mechanical depth — an ambitious scope for a first release, and one that several reviewers explicitly credit as impressive on its own terms regardless of the bugs. A small team building that many interlocking systems without a large, dedicated QA department is a specific, predictable recipe for exactly the kind of scattered, serious bugs the review corpus describes, rather than evidence the underlying design is unsound. One detailed review, written specifically after a 1.0.6 patch and following 200 hours of pre-patch play, reports that most major bugs have since been resolved and argues the game "deserves far better than its current Mixed" score as a result — a genuinely useful data point suggesting the launch-week bug pattern may already be easing, even if the Mixed score itself, built on a much larger pool of earlier reviews, hasn't caught up to that yet.

Value

At NZ$43.59, Of Ash and Steel sits at a mid-to-full price point for a stated 45-plus hours of main story content plus substantial faction and profession systems, a reasonable ask if the game delivers reliably on that scope. The Mixed score — roughly two-thirds positive against one-third negative across nearly 7,000 reviews — reflects a genuine, well-documented split between players who found the specific old-school exploration and combat loop worth pushing through real bugs for, and players who ran into progression-blocking issues serious enough to call the release unfinished. A striking number of reviewers on both sides of that split explicitly recommend the same course of action regardless of which way their thumbs point: wait for further patches before buying, then judge the game on its systems rather than its launch-week technical state.