Ashwalkers: A Survival Journey

I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I've never liked the term "walking simulator." Beyond it being a way to smugly dismiss an entire genre of games, it's not even an accurate description. Those games are about the stories, not the walking. Now, Ashwalkers on the other hand, is what I would call a walking simulator. It's a survival game where most of what you do is walk through a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to stay alive long enough to find a new home for a few hundred-thousand survivors. It's a slow, monotonous and exhausting journey that expertly simulates the experience of spending two months walking to safety. It's also a haunting, beautiful and surprisingly meditative debut from the brand-new studio Nameless XIII. Take a stroll with me and I'll show you why Ashwalkers is worth your time.

Set hundreds of years after a geological disaster that made most of Earth uninhabitable, Ashwalkers tells the story of a four-person squad who is tasked with going on a dangerous journey to the legendary Dome of Domes. If all goes well, this dome will be the new home for the 250,000 people currently living at the Citadel, but many wonder if this fabled safe haven even exists. And if it does, will the people there welcome the survivors with open arms? To answer those questions, they've chosen four people to brave the unbreathable, ash-filled air to find a new home for the people of the Citadel.

It's worth noting that the four-person squad was not assembled at random, as every member has a role to play. There's Petra, the captain, a powerful warrior named Sinh, Kali the diplomat and Nadir, who is a fantastic scout. Each offers a skill and expertise that perfectly complements the party, allowing them to weave in and out of pretty much any problem or obstacle they encounter. At least, that's the thinking. What ultimately happens on this harrowing journey will force them to work together, and even that may not be enough to make it to the Dome of Domes.

Like I said at the top, this is a game that is mainly about walking through the wasteland. It's also a game about surviving. With every step they take, the squad is expelling energy, losing warmth and getting hungry. They'll need to pick up wood for the fire and health kits for life-threatening injuries, as well as food, that way they don't starve to death. They'll be able to set up camp at just about any spot on their journey, which is where they can rest, eat, warm up and do all the maintenance needed to stay alive long enough to reach their destination.

Along the way, the squad will need to make a number of tough decisions that could have dire consequences. Sometimes it's as simple as choosing whether to go left or right, but often you'll have three or four ways of dealing with tough situations. For example, you can take a diplomatic approach when running into other survivors, or you can go on the attack and steal their equipment. At the same time, there might be a better way to deal with things, such as stealthily sneaking around them or killing a massive wolf to prove your strength. How you handle each choice will play into how the story unfolds, all of which will dictate what ending you'll see. There are 34 conclusions in all, if that gives you a hint at how many directions this game can go in.

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With each run lasting only a couple hours, this is a game designed to be played multiple times. Ashwalkers is not the kind of journey where you'll be able to see everything the first time through, and you'll want to immediately jump back in to see where the different paths take our heroes. Simple things like going left instead of right will dramatically change up the locations you see, the information you learn and the way you ultimately interact with the nearby nomads. In my first trip through the ashy world, I ended up barely surviving the Ice Desert, while in my very next playthrough, I was in a much hotter kind of desert. In another trip, I learned troubling information from a scouting group that went out ahead of us, while in a different playthrough, I discovered a truly frightening civilization tucked far underground. And no matter if I completed my mission, diverted from the original path or even had most of my squad members die, I found that the endings were satisfying and realistic. The more I learn and discover about this world, the more interested I am to go back and try to see all 34 endings. But let me tell you, that's going to take some real dedication.

For as curious as I am to see how outlandish the endings can be, I worry that I'll end up hating walking through ash before I learn and see everything. While my playthroughs may have played out in a lot of different ways, there were also plenty of moments that were identical in every single session. This includes the level designs and a lot of the story beats. Even as somebody who played through it a number of different times, I was still finding a lot of repetition between the journeys. This is the kind of game that would be greatly improved with procedurally generated landscapes or other random elements. I was bored of the first couple locations after only a few playthroughs, so I can only imagine how frustrating it is when it's your thirtieth time. There's a nice variety of choices to be made along the way, but not enough to keep 34 different attempts fresh each time.

It doesn't help that the worlds we've given to explore aren't nearly as big and vast as the gorgeous graphics would have you believe. The world may look wide-open, but too much of the game traps you on these narrow paths that you can't escape. Every time you try to go a few steps off the set path, you'll hit an invisible wall. Every single time. And you won't even know you're about to hit one, because there's no indication that you can't go in that direction. A lot of the game is you getting stuck on these invisible walls and trying to find the narrow path again, which makes a lot of the stages feel too linear for their own good. Instead of being big and epic, a lot of the journey tosses you into locations that come across as small and hard to navigate.

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It's also worth mentioning that the game has a few annoying technical problems, ranging from crashes to a game-breaking bug where my squad would get stuck in the environment with no way to escape. I ended up having to close the game through task manger multiple times because the game got stuck trying (and failing) to load a particular story event. There's also some stuttering and drop frames when it comes to the animation, which makes me hope that the developer will focus on optimizing the game in future updates.

But even with those imperfections, I couldn't help but fall in love with this ashy world. The black and white graphics are stunning, with every character, building and remnant from the past designed to look like somebody sketched it with a pencil. It feels almost minimalistic, yet the backgrounds are all gorgeously detailed. Simple things, like a crashed airplane or abandoned mine, really pop in this style, and I especially like how the color red is used. Even if there weren't 34 endings to see, I would still want to play through this game multiple times to experience the art style and stunning locations. Whether or not I'm actually going to play through this game 34 times, well, that's a completely different conversation.