As the year draws to a close, one of the biggest surprises that really stood out to me was the success of the indie horror genre. Some of my favorite games released this year have been attached to this label, such as Mouthwashing, a title that managed to be successful despite any real “scares.”
There are countless other examples that impressed me to a point that every time I start up a new indie horror game, I can’t contain my excitement as I await to see how it will push my expectations of the genre to its limits. This brings me to Among Ashes, the first horror game from Rat Cliff Games.
Its premise is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and elicits a feeling of nostalgia to the era of the internet where the “haunted video game” genre was everywhere, through stories such as Ben Drowned or the Lavender Town Syndrome conspiracy. The graphics are also a mix between a traditional PS1 title and an old 90s/2000s horror experience. In theory, it sounds like it could be a new horror classic.
Unfortunately, while I enjoyed a lot of my time with Among Ashes, I was largely frustrated due to its many bugs and glitches. After around five hours of softlocks, dead ends, and crashes, my initial awe gave way to disappointment.
A Game Within A Game
Among Ashes starts in a way that I doubt anyone would ever expect. The protagonist is in the middle of playing a first-person shooter eerily similar to Doom. The game is played on an old PC right out of the late 90s and early 2000s, and that atmosphere is only intensified when he receives a message on a chatroom from a friend. The friend sends him a link to a new terrifying horror game, similar to “Resident Devil” or “Silent Mill.”
You, as the protagonist, download the game, titled “Night Call,” and begin to play it. As it continues, anomalies begin to occur in the real world: notes asking “Can You See Me?” begin to appear under the doorway. Further, a loud knocking can be heard at the door with no one there, the windows will randomly open and close, and the boundaries between the reality of the game and the real world begin to break. The only way to stop this? Keep playing.
Within minutes, I was sold on Among Ashes‘ premise. The idea of a haunted game feels so nostalgic, especially as someone who grew up in an age where people were creating stories about ghosts and other horrors causing chaos via a cursed video game disc and/or cartridge. It felt like an idea that not many people had taken advantage of in the past, and Rat Cliff Games did an exceptional job of blending the mechanical basis of Among Ashes with the gameplay loop.
“Night Call” is, in a lot of ways, like any other old horror game. Specifically, it shares a lot of similarities to Silent Hill: before you get a gun, you get a melee weapon. The melee weapon does a little bit of damage and opens the main character up to risk, but can be used at any point without needing to be concerned about ammo and durability. The gun can deal higher damage, but is harder to aim and requires a certain amount of ammo. In many ways, the gameplay can sometimes feel cliched and even boring.
Where Among Ashes excels is in the moments where you’re not playing “Night Call.” At certain moments, there will be certain elements and solutions missing due to some malignant force inside the code. Your friend will send you a link to a forum where others have discussed the aforementioned glitch, and you’ll have to interpret their findings in order to solve the puzzle.
Even though, as I’ll get into later, the amount of puzzles can often feel a bit extreme. Additionally, the story of “Night Call” itself, with a mansion being home to experiments that bring the dead back to life, isn’t all that compelling. In fact, the story of Among Ashes itself is very understated, which works to both its benefit and detriment. What makes up for these drawbacks is that the game is actually pretty scary.
There are some great moments when horrors will hide in the background with no jumpscare, and I’d also get a chill when I’d spot a shadowy figure only to look back and see that its gone. While there are some cheap jumpscares, they never feel too extreme, and they add to the overall tension and atmosphere of “Night Call” spectacularly. The monster designs also feel like the right blend between traditional zombies and the more plant-like theme the game is going for.
Overall, the premise of Among Ashes is its biggest selling point, and the way the gameplay compliments it definitely had me hooked for most of my playtime. However, as I played more, I really started to grow frustrated with how many glitches and random puzzles were littered throughout the experience.
Countless Glitches in the Matrix
One of the first things Among Ashes makes sure you keep in mind is that “Night Call” has quite a few intentional glitches. In the beginning, I thought it was an interesting allusion to the aforementioned “haunted video game” trope. That said, as I poured more hours into this game, it started to feel a little bit ironic with how many actual glitches were there.
I played Among Ashes on the Steam Deck, and I’m not sure if it’s something wrong with this version specifically, but I encountered an almost egregious amount of bugs. Some of them were minor in the grand scheme of things. For example, certain enemies would phase through walls and would fire projectiles, despite being in entirely different rooms. There is a sequence where you’re interacting with a computer and I kept getting hit by a projectile from an entirely different room, which caused some confusion.
Something else I noticed is that enemies have the tendency to trap you in a corner. Some of the monsters I encountered would push me into a wall to the point where escape was impossible, leaving me to do nothing except wait for them to kill me. These were definitely frustrating, but nothing I haven’t seen before. However, the moment I realized something was wrong was when I saw that even the death screen was glitched. It would vibrate if you didn’t press anything after death, causing the letters to be jumbled, which would carry over to the main menu.
Where the glitches really started to escalate was in the late game. There were some cases in select minigames where an enemy would trap me to such an extent that I wouldn’t be able to escape, and I couldn’t deal any damage to them, nor could they deal any to me. This would force a restart. One section, an underground lab, took up almost an hour of my playtime due to some of the bugs.
At one point, after trying to backtrack to another area of the map, my character fell through the floor and into the skybox, forcing yet another restart. One area had a set of colored switches, that involved getting up from the computer and interacting with the player’s home. In a surprise twist, the character’s home had transformed into an area right from “Night Call,” in which you’d have to flip switches in the “real world” to activate doors in the game.
However, this area had another moment that caused a softlock. In the earliest hours of the game, I noticed that some items would remain even after being sent back to a checkpoint, yet you’d still have to collect them again before moving on. For instance, if a puzzle involves finding keys, after death, you’d actually find duplicate keys. In this case, some doors would remain unlocked. After walking through them and hitting another switch, they’d reset, trapping you inside, which forced to restart yet again.
Speaking of puzzles, that was another problem I noticed: there were too many of them. A lot of horror games, especially classic ones, have puzzles. Among Ashes‘ puzzles felt particularly bloated and intentionally obtuse. In that aforementioned lab area, some puzzles had no telegraphs and barely any hints.
On the one hand, puzzles aren’t supposed to be easy, and sometimes require brute force to solve, which is fine. However, when trying to solve a problem under threat of a softlock or worse, enemies coming back from the dead to attack in an area with limited healing items and limited ammo, it becomes far more infuriating. Worse still, in the case of one puzzle that involves a set of keys required for progression, I can’t find the last key.
I’ve looked in every corner, backtracked for hours, even interacted with every single object that I could find, and still, nothing. The moment I realized that I couldn’t tell if I had just missed something in plain view or if the key had just been glitched was the exact moment I couldn’t continue any further.
While I loved the premise of Among Ashes, the problems I faced when it came to both glitches and puzzles soured my overall enjoyment of the experience. While I do recommend the game, I don’t think its worth spending money on, at least not yet.
Brilliant Premise, Broken Execution
My opinions of Among Ashes flipped every few minutes. On the one hand, I loved the premise of the game within a game that forces you to play a fictional horror title, interact with the player’s companions through old chat rooms, dig through forums to find solutions to puzzles, and walk around the real world to observe the ongoing haunting he’s experiencing.
On the other hand, I had major issues with the story, the puzzles, and the several glitches I experienced. The latter two points being so bad that I still haven’t beaten the game, even after hours of searching around one of its last areas. Even though I later found out that the developer is currently in the progress any and all issues, I still felt that my overall experience had been ruined.
I have no doubt that Among Ashes‘ problems will eventually be ironed out. As such, I also suspect that some people might end up really liking the game, as the premise is very appealing and some of the scares are genuinely unsettling. At the end of the day though, with the current state that Among Ashes is in, I do not recommend purchasing it at this time, at least until some of the major issues are fixed.
Disclaimer: Rat Cliff Games provided Final Weapon with a PC (Steam) copy of Among Ashes for review purposes.
