Video Game Review: Ashwalkers

Developer: Nameless XIII

Publisher: Dear Villagers

Genre: Adventure

Reviewed For: Nintendo Switch

The concept of group survival as a game has been the backbone of gamers born in the late 70s to early 80s, and it’s clear to see why. The inclusion of The Oregon Trail as a teaching tool inadvertently got players hooked to three separate concepts: tactical calculations, sacrificial decisions, and the unfairness of random chances. Anyone who had to look at an Apple IIe will understand the frustration of careful, meticulous use of resources and pathways being all for naught as dysentery destroys a whole family less than 50 miles from Oregon. Survival, therefore, became the name of the game and subsequently branched into so many types of games, from survival horror to simulation titles, as Sim City 2000 was the same ideas with different elements applied.

All of this is in recognition of the scope of interest that Ashwalkers brings to the table as a Nintendo Switch title. Ashwalkers is the launch title from development team Nameless XIII, which is a new venture from some of the DONTNOD developers. Set in some form of post-apocalyptic future, you play a group of four survivors, existing some 200 hundred years after a cataclysmic event. Forced to live in a perpetual state of fear due to the toxic atmosphere, your team hears rumors of a Dome that can be a paradise for those lucky enough to venture there. Using your wits, your individual skills and your own leadership talents, you must guide your party across hostile terrain, full of unforgiving weather, aggressive mutant animals, and the ever-chaotic nature of man, where fellow survivors may help or hinder your progress with reckless abandon. The future is yours if you can survive, but don’t focus on the end: try to think about now, and how to get to tomorrow.

Thematically, Ashwalkers is a brilliant set piece for ideas and concepts that are well executed against a truly bleak backdrop. Each moment out in the wild of this new world is one that steadily depletes your party of health, energy, hunger and morale. Controlling the party as a group of four, you can swap out different members to take the lead, giving a different approach to each situation as you get there. Rather than being a static screen with moving text, you plod through the landscape from a 3rd person perspective, letting the player drink in the vast reality where Ashwalkers takes place, further bringing in the full scope of what the world is like now. This amplification allows you to immerse yourself into the mentality of it all, and gives greater gravity to your decisions as they present themselves. You see the results immediately from taking either cunning, bravery, brashness or grim realism into your decisions.

While the gameplay can be very straightforward, it’s the more complex aspects and the repercussions that make Ashwalkers more than just a Oregon Trail homage. Failure to eat enough won’t just make your characters weak and possibly dead, it affects their ability to reason and may impede you from taking more rational decisions off the table. When a character dies (as they most assuredly will on your first couple playthroughs), the atmosphere changes and suddenly the weight of your decision to venture out is heavier, and you seem to move slower (and your energy recharges slower, or at least it seemed to). You have to carefully decide if you want to sacrifice items from your limited inventory in order to survive encounters with the beasts of the dead zone, or barter with barbarians that you may or may not be able to take in a fight. This isn’t as simple as stocking up at the trading post and fording the river: this is figuring out if it’s worth having the cave dweller eat someone in order to ensure the remaining party members survive.
Best of all, the way Ashwalkers is presented allows for all this haunting and frankly depressing gameplay to come through in the strongest way possible. The soundtrack is engrossingly dark and melancholy, giving me vibes of the World of Ruin in Final Fantasy 6. While all elements of the game are done up in shades of gray and dust to emphasize the results of the ash cloud, you still have details and finely tuned aspects that pop up, particularly when someone is damaged. It’s got that black and white with stabs of red mentality that lets you focus on what’s happening and not on how beautiful everything is. On the contrary, the awful reality of the world around you keeps you locked in on how to get through it all, even if, sadly, you can’t completely figure out what it is you’re doing.

The downside of Ashwalkers, at least for the Nintendo Switch, is that it frankly isn’t a good port. The amount of text on screen is difficult, if not impossible, to coherently read when it pops up in handheld mode. I was squinting trying to read the details about my party’s ups and downs before giving up and just forging ahead. Beyond that, though, is the graphical and mechanical performance and how it chugs frequently. For a game where all the combat and action take place off camera and the dialogue isn’t voiced you still end up with something that’s ridiculously rough around the edges. Moving forward is a chore, and you’d think it might be easier with everything being monotone, but no: the draw distance gets heavily affected the deeper into the game you go. If I’m being perfectly honest, I would have given up on this game hours ago had I not been reviewing it, and that doesn’t bode well for the game for the layman coming into it.
Thankfully, this is all something that can be improved through QOL updates: better optimization, downscaling of graphics to improve speed and response, and some better placement of the text bubbles in order to make it more legible. I’m hopeful that it can be done without needing to redux from the ground up, as Ashwalkers has the right idea and the right mindset to be a truly immersive experience. With multiple endings and tons of choices that vary from run to run, it’s a dark and grim journey that will absolutely draw you in.

A complex and thoughtful piece, Ashwalkers suffers from porting issues, otherwise hamstringing a truly unique experience.