From the Archives: Ashes [2063 and Afterglow]
Hold on to your ashes
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those, like this one, that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
Ashes is a GZDoom engine game set in a post-apocalyptic Georgia. There are currently two episodes out - episode one is called Ashes: 2063, and the second is Ashes: Afterglow. In both, you play as the same character, an unnamed scavenger making his way from settlement to settlement, picking up jobs for transport and retrieval, looting irradiated buildings, and keeping his hog fueled up. Eventually you get wrapped up in local drama, follow some leads to an old military facility, and try to avert Armageddon from happening… again.
GZDoom is a pretty powerful and robust engine, despite its antique bones, and it’s rarely looked or felt as good as it does in Ashes. The levels and sprites are rich with detail, very little feels particularly out of place or barebones, and the game does a fantastic job of blending gameplay considerations with setting and graphical limitations. Abandoned, rotting husks of vehicles, decaying city buildings, and overgrown tunnels have just the right amount of Doom wad chunkiness, smartly chosen texture work, and most importantly, they’re not a miserable clingy mess to navigate.
Climbing onto wrecks, crawling through broken windows, and sprinting through the aisles of a former grocery store feel more intuitive and smooth than most games in a more modern engine, and accessible paths are visually distinguishable even when they’re supposed to be ‘hidden’ or non-obvious. I mention all of that because it’s not necessarily going to be the case, especially with this engine.
One of the closest comparison points I have for Ashes is Hedon, another GZDoom engine title that blew me away when it was released a few years ago, and there are a lot of direct similarities between them. The biggest one is probably the structure. Like Hedon, Ashes is split between two episodes which play very differently from each other. The first episode in both is a linear series of levels, which themselves are all sprawling, fairly open stages to explore, dig up loot caches, unlock shortcuts and pick apart, but still cleared and moved on from in order.
The second episode of both are designed more as open worlds a la Hexen, with multiple levels being explored and progressed as you crisscross between them, leaving and revisiting some areas later. Even the structure of these second episodes is very similar between games, split between two halves, each with the ‘open world’ levels spoked off of a friendlier hub area, and complex side objectives being abandoned if you move past a point of no return.
Where Ashes goes a little further than Hedon is with the mechanical depth of this second episode. The first episode of Ashes plays with some RPG elements – a few side objectives, some dialogue choices, and the ability to collect junk as money to buy ammo and armor at a handful of ‘town’ stages along the way. The second episode leverages the more free-form structure and the more reliable access to settlements to really turn it into something more interesting. There are workbenches scattered around the game world, for example, and they allow you to upgrade each gun in your arsenal two times, if you have the scrap.
Settlements also have more going on, with some sidequests giving you unique rewards like longer lasting lantern batteries, shops including permanent upgrades like increased ammo capacity for the weapon of your choosing, gambling, and even a racing minigame. The story and RPG aspects also pick up – you have to roam out to new areas to hunt for items crucial to progress, new routes connecting maps or allowing access to new ones, and even making major alliance choices in the final hub area.
The gun upgrades do a lot to endear you to the weapons, making you feel like you’re really customizing your gear to suit your playstyle, and it helps that the guns themselves are all quite good. The basic revolver remains a steady, reliable means of dropping human raiders, the pump action shotgun has a satisfying rhythm of firing and following up with a melee crack on the skull from its stock, and so on. I found myself juggling weapons a lot more in general than I do in similar games, relishing the opportunities I had to whip out the flamethrower or bolt action rifle, and upgrading almost everything by the end of the game.
If I had to make a complaint, I would say that the double barreled shotgun is a bit underwhelming – even once it’s a triple barreled shotgun, it doesn’t do enough MORE damage in one blast than a few shots from the pump shotty to actually kill mid-tier and higher enemies any faster or more reliably, and once you pick it up, it occupies the first spot on your 3 key, so you have to cycle past it any time you want to use your pump action. It’s still fun to use, but it doesn’t outclass the standard shotgun in any situations the way the SSG from Doom 2 does.
The setting and story work well, and though some of the locations are a little too claustrophobic and convoluted, there’s generally enough going on that they feel more or less like real spaces. Duke 3D is the game that I always think of as the turning point in trying to really reproduce relatable grounded places, and Ashes does a better job than even the early levels of that. Almost every secret has some kind of visual hint to its existence, whether it’s a window you can catch a glimpse of flashing loot through, an exposed elevator cable, or a door that only opens one way, and the levels also have dynamic elements and loopback designs like ladders you can release from higher areas, Souls style.
There’s a small amount of pretty amateurish but charming voice acting, but a lot more writing in the dialogue trees, much of it just for flavor or to tell a joke. As expected, there are plenty of Easter eggs too, even including secret joke weapons. I ended up reading a lot of the text, including old messages on security terminals and the like, and I don’t have any real complaints about the story or writing. The music is also pretty solid, as are the sound effects in general.
I have a few very minor issues with the game. One is that the lantern you get as a light source is solar powered, meaning it slowly regains its battery bar as you stand in sectors tagged as being in full daylight. This is a pretty reasonable limitation to keep you from just having it on all the time as you explore buildings, but there are a few levels, especially later on, where there just aren’t enough daylight sectors in a region, or they also happen to be irradiated, and either way it means you’re going to have to make a choice between continuing to explore blind, run back to a sector you’ve been in before just to stand in the sun for a while and walk back, or shuffle in and out of a building to very slowly build up your battery.
I also felt like the game could have used a map marking system like Hedon has, considering the density of locations and the need to occasionally cross multiple loading zones to try out a key. It’s incredibly frustrating to find, for example, a silver key, and then zoom way in on the minimap and squint as you pan around hoping to spot the linedef that’s SILVER and not grey. Some of the quests have extremely vague lead-ins, and I gave up on figuring out what about a third of them wanted me to do, including the main branch in the last half of the second ep, where I never did find whatever trigger I needed to side with the opposing faction. You do get a journal that lists your quests and has an overview map of your current open world area, but there are no details in it, not even things that the NPCs told you like the level you should be looking in. Finally, the last boss is pretty annoying, and you still have to survive a gauntlet to escape afterwards, so if you spend all your resources during that fight, you’ll be kind of screwed on the way out.
Ashes is a fantastic shooter, and most importantly, it’s a free download. I’ve forgone a longer explanation of all the little things to find and do in it because it’s worth finding out for yourself. They’re working on a third, prequel episode, but I think the two ep series currently available is worth playing right now.
Afterward
Ashes now has some additional content, in the form of the Dead Man Walking expansion for 2063, and a full third episode, called Hard Reset. I have not played any of it yet. There’s also another short episode titled Undertow with a new character, weapon set, and movement abilities in the works.
Ashes, the two parts of it that I played at least, was my 7th favorite game of 2024.
Ashes can be downloaded from ModDB.