Ashwalkers review. Ashes without a spark – review addiction

Only color blind people will survive

The Ashwalkers have a rather blurry plot and backstory. Another global catastrophe not only practically destroyed humanity, but also covered the planet with a thick layer of poisonous volcanic ash. Few survivors managed to escape in special shelters, but at least one of them was not reliable enough. “Citadel” – a large refuge with a population of as many as two hundred thousand people – is about to fail, and its inhabitants will be doomed to death. This time, you can’t get off with a water chip, and only the legend of the “Dome of Domes” – a mythical enclave that may well provide the population with everything necessary, can save the situation. A small squad of four people is sent in search of a new home: the commander-engineer Petra, the secretive scout Nadir, the brave warrior Sinh and the diplomat Kali.

Thanks to the unusual design, the game looks quite nice, but in the dynamics the picture is spoiled not by the best character animations and the almost complete absence of those in the environment

The journey of this company will be led by the player: in Ashwalkers we control a group of characters, freely switching between them at any time. The road ahead is full of dangers classic for the genre – bandits, wild animals, hostile environment. And in between adventures, it is necessary to satisfy the numerous whims of all four characters – the group will have to be regularly fed, warmed and even entertained at constant halts. Parking lots, in turn, not only waste valuable resources, but also carry certain risks: the longer and brighter the fire burns, the higher the chance that someone will notice it.

But the main emphasis in Ashwalkers is precisely on the narrative. Each plot event can be resolved in several ways, and the choice made often makes itself felt in the future, and sometimes in a very unexpected way. There are so many forks in the course of the plot that the developers promise more than thirty endings, but each playthrough is a small story for two to three hours of real time.

With the death of each of the characters, the player loses access to the choices for which they were responsible. For example, having lost Sinha, solving problems with brute force will no longer work.

And these stories, for the most part, came out really interesting. The decisions that the player makes during the journey constantly lead to unexpected consequences and take the plot into new branches. In the world of Ashwalkers, you never know in advance who to trust and who to bypass. Any action can both enrich the squad with resources and allies, and lead to the permanent death of one of the characters. And in between adventures, the process dilutes with unpretentious gameplay and meditative, contemplative marches through beautiful locations.

As a result, Ashwalkers is quite capable of captivating for a couple of hours. Tell one of thirty stories, plunge into the melancholy of a quiet post-apocalypse and leave in the finale with a feeling of light sadness or, if you’re lucky, hope. But the number of endings and the short duration clearly hint that the game is best played multiple times. Each ending has its own name and icon on the in-game achievement board, and after the first passage Ashwalkers allows you to slightly change the starting conditions and the starting location in order to get into new storylines faster and easier.

And from this moment the problems begin.

There are thirty-four endings in total, but not all of them are equally well written.

Kupolovich Kupol Kupolov

The longer you play Ashwalkers, the more difficult it is to endure its shortcomings: one of the main ones is the gameplay itself. The survival mechanics themselves are well done and can even boast of curious nuances. For example, the weather conditions directly affect the needs of the characters – the clear sun warms well, and the downpours make the survivors bored. Moreover, each member of the group has its own characteristics of physiology and psyche: someone gets tired faster, someone is more likely to experience hunger or anxiety. There is also a camp visibility system, which I described above – the longer you stand in one place and light up the fire brighter, the higher the resource consumption and the chance to attract attention to yourself.

Battles here are also presented in text.

Such little things could give Ashwalkers a lot, but, unfortunately, they were all created as if for a completely different game, but here they feel extremely foreign. Literally the entire gameplay consists of walking through absolutely linear locations without the slightest hint of a fork: plot events, presented in the form of windows with text, are issued strictly according to scripts. And between these events there is nothing but resources scattered along the road and the rapidly melting needs of the characters. There are no enemies, no puzzles, or even any obstacles: you just wander from one scene to another, watching your charges languish. And they wither ridiculously quickly, the detachment has to be stopped for a halt literally every three to five minutes. Getting up to rest twice a hundred meters away is a common thing.

Small random events occur on vacation, but they never promise anything more than a banal change in needs or stock of resources

In addition, the halts themselves boil down to the exchange of some resources for others. Someone needs a break? Spend firewood on energy. Not enough food? You can send someone for supplies – it’s just an exchange of energy for resources. Are the characters sad? Instead of resting, let them tell stories around the fire. This management does not cause any particular difficulties – the game generously floods with resources, never depriving the opportunity to collect new ones. Abundance negatively affects not only the gameplay, but also its connection with the narrative – the temptation to take risks or make a deal with conscience for the sake of an extra first aid kit, as in some This war of mine, is absent here in principle. Aspects of survival not only give nothing to the game, but also actively distract from the narrative: at the end of the plot, constant stops for the night begin to become very annoying.

This is how the brutal attack of three giant birds on the savage looks in the game.

And this is sad, because Ashwalkers, it seems, wants to be a “real” survivor with all that it implies. There is permanent death, hunger, cold and fatigue, the fight against the environment, resource management – except that craft and construction were not delivered. But they are not the key elements of the game, but extremely linear and, in general, short transitions between text events. The necessary mechanics are formally in place, but in the realities of Ashwalkers they simply have nowhere to open up.

However, with the narration here, too, not everything is smooth. Most of the plot and lore are made up of details, and to fully understand it, you will have to go through the game more than once or twice. As a result, the rather abstract story is artificially stretched over several playthroughs, which makes it unclear what is going on most of the time. We get new pieces of lore not so much from dialogs as from opening pages of the in-game encyclopedia: we stumbled upon a settlement – the game will kindly tell about it in the diary. The method, frankly, is not the most elegant one. In order for the player to have a desire to explore the world, he must at least somehow be interested in this world, but in Ashwalkers, at first there is simply nothing to be interested in, and then it becomes all the same.

All living creatures, except for the main characters, look like black silhouettes. The move, apparently, was taken for the sake of economy rather than an aesthetic component

The characters also fail. Initially, one might get the impression that the four of travelers and their relationships with each other will play an important role: after all, it is not in vain that the authors emphasize that they can die, and their morality is as important a need as hunger and fatigue. Unfortunately, the Ashwalkers treat heroes like tools. Yes, they all have a striking design and character, and each time the player is given a choice, one of the heroes offers that choice. Whatever happens along the way, the scout Nadir will always try to avoid problems and hide, and the diplomat Kali will insist on a peaceful approach. Unfortunately, this is where their personality traits end. In any situation, the Sinh warrior behaves like a stereotypical swashbuckler, and allegedly the intellectual Petra differs from him only in her love of collecting all sorts of traps from the trash at hand.

The element of survival is ruined by the complete lack of exploring locations. In the game, even the camera cannot be rotated in order to better inspect the environment

This is largely a consequence of the fact that the characters hardly communicate with each other: on the way, all the characters are invariably silent, only occasionally commenting on the weather or their condition. The wards can literally be forced to talk by the fire, but this does not help much – the bikes in the camp are often either reduced to stories from the past, or they work for the only character trait from which the player is already guaranteed to be tired by this moment. Likewise, you get tired of the visual design of the setting: the entire environment in Ashwalkers is executed in the same gray tones, with rare splashes of red blood or black monster figures. And although the views themselves turned out to be impressive, the endless grayness of the eyes already on the first playthrough begins to hurt. And this only exacerbates the already painful boredom.

For everything in Ashwalkers, everything turned out to be a gray mean. Nothing is hopelessly bad, but every single element is inevitably tainted with annoying and extremely annoying flaws. The inexperience of the team and the lack of budget led to the fact that the game really lacks some more serious gameplay content – open locations, complex survival, “sandbox”.

But all this can be completely forgiven if you stop after the first playthrough. Despite the mistakes of the authors, Ashwalkers is recognized as an attempt to create a catchy atmosphere and a fascinating, ramified story. And this attempt deserves to see at least one of thirty possible endings.

Pleased

• melancholic mood;
• moral dilemmas;
• slightly blurred, but decent plot;
• interesting design of locations and main characters.

Upset

• slow gameplay;
• the survival system distracts from the story;
• the visuals are tiresome;
• budget and lack of polish;
• poor elaboration of characters.

How we played

In what: key purchased on Steam.

On what: PC.

How many: about thirteen hours for five complete playthroughs.

Achievement of the editorial office

“I’m fine”

Not to find anything unusual in the visual range due to color blindness.

About localization

There is no Russian localization.

Verdict

Ashwalkers look like a huge lifeless wasteland, in the middle of which a single green sprout has broken through from under the dried soil. He, of course, can grow into a beautiful flower, but around him are miles of gameplay emptiness. Whether this journey is worth the time depends only on how much you love post-apocalyptic plots and depressing walking simulators.