Ashes sees the players watching the story of Azar Warren unfold in a lovely comic-book style, with the player navigating through the story by advancing to the next panel or changing the page of the book (the story’s narrative mechanic).

Azar’s story begins with being taken to her grandfather Stan’s home, a grandfather she doesn’t really know, to escape trouble that’s following her. We find out shortly after that Azar had witnessed a killing (I’m unclear if it was murder or manslaughter, not that that matters). Azar’s grandfather isn’t a popular man in the family, and Azar is less than thrilled being there as he lives in a secluded bush property in the outback.

The gameplay loop of Ashes is as follows: The player advances the story through turning the page, they are presented with a mini-game or a puzzle, and the story continues. This loop sounds simple but it’s well-designed and it’s battle-tested in the industry. Most narrative driven games such as the Life Is Strange franchise of games follow this formula in one way or another, and of-course narrative games in this style have existed since the 90’s, but as I was playing through this experience the game I kept coming back to was the sleeper hit As Dusk Falls. I feel like these two games exist very closely in the medium.

Narrative structures are flexible things, and when you’re attempting to bridge mediums such as comic-books and games you can do a lot of very interesting things, especially with puzzles and character-development. It’s my opinion that video-games have historically had a weak-spot for narrative-development because a game developer has to walk the line between telling a story and implement levels and mechanics and all of the rest of it — the rise of the ‘point-and-click’ style of games made famous by companies such as LucasArts changed the entire scene. Ashes inherits the DNA of games such as Grim Fandango, Broken Sword, and Loom, by providing a narrative-forward experience that doesn’t put a great deal of weight of specific game-mechanics, instead having the player experience a story and characters through a guided and pointed flow of scenes, throwing an occasional puzzle into the mix to give players something to think through.

Ashes tries to use this narrative-mechanic well, but the scenes progress so quickly that it feels like the actual narrative is an afterthought for Plot Twist, as we get very little world-building and even less character-development. Character motivations beyond obvious and low-hanging dialogue are unclear and are not very well explained (it’s important to note that Ashes is an early-access game, and as such there’s not a lot to work with right now). Mini-games do the heavy lifting for world-building, which in my opinion is not a strength for a game of this style — mini-games should be the pressure-release valve from the story, not one of the core ways we find out about the plot.

The mini-games that break up the story are diverse, but I did find them very simple; the player is given a puzzle such as collecting torn pieces of a photo from a room in disarray, which is a neat narrative device as it forces the player to properly look at the scene, taking in details of the world subconsciously, as they hunt for the four torn pieces, but I couldn’t help but feel that the mini-games felt awkwardly childish considering the dark subject-matter, for example one mini-game is an escape sequence where the player has to collect bush animals — it looked interesting visually, as Plot Twist make great use of mixed media to breath life into their scenes, but in this instance the childish nature of the mini-game sharply contrasted with the dark subject matter.

The underlying premise of the challenging teenager and broken families is fairly standard for Australian drama, there are more supernatural elements at play but I won’t visit those themes in this post until the game is complete and we provide a revised review. Broken families are a classic hit all over the world, but they do work wonders for modern narrative-games as they all writers to force their characters into unfamiliar locales etc. The personality of Azar is standard, I’ve seen it a million times across all media forms, unfortunately there’s little to work with at this stage as we don’t really know her very well by the end of the current demo, the dialogue and exposition don’t inform us much about who she is, we come to know why she is in the problem that she’s in, but I didn’t feel any emotional connecting to her, and I didn’t particularly care about her would-be assailants. Azar also wears a shirt that literally says ‘Problem Child‘, which makes me cringe.

Stan is another story, though. Stan’s character has legs. I’m a sucker for the grumpy older character with a mysterious past — especially if it’s tormenting them with a spooky-twist. Azar is rightfully intimidated by her grandfather, and she’ll come to realise why he is the way that he in further updates (hopefully!). Stan comes off as being a dick; having a rude and aggressive approach, that at first I didn’t like, but then after certain story-beats were revealed I sympathize more with his temperament — some people are meant to be alone.

The mixed-media approach in Ashes mostly works. Plot Twist use the natural Australian landscape to good effect, having a kind-of collage style where 2D assets are placed on-top of and around photos of the bush, giving it an ‘alt-comic’ vibe that I really liked. The only problem is that some of the 2D assets are lower in resolution than the environment, which doesn’t look great (to be fair I’m playing on a 1440p monitor). The graphic-design for the panels and page turning effects is nice.

Ashes is in-development and is an early-access title. The game took me around 30 minutes to complete, I enjoyed it overall. This review is only my initial impression of a studio’s first-attempt at a game and only a small snippet of the game at that. I look forward to updating this review when the game is officially released and we can get across the entire story, and see how everything works as a whole complete product.

3.5/5