Chronos: Before the Ashes
Gunfire Games, THQ Nordic
Hack’n’Slash Adventure/Souls-like
Playstation 4
Last year (whatever that means) developer Gunfire Games released Remnant: From The Ashes, a Souls-like with a multiplayer focus which, though I have not had the opportunity to try myself, I have heard very good things about and want to play at some point. In 2016, three years before the release of Remnant, Gunfire released a VR-exclusive game called Chronos, to which Remnant is a sequel and of which Chronos: Before the Ashes is a non-VR re-release. Like Remnant, Chronos is a souls-like, but unlike Remnant, there is no multiplayer.
Despite that I only this year got around to actually playing Dark Souls, I have over the years played my fair share of Souls-likes, and Chronos: Before the Ashes is definitely up there as one of the better ones. The movement of the player character and general flow of combat feel very slow initially, but in a way that the player can quickly adapt to and enjoy. Pacing aside, the gameplay is fairly standard for a souls-like; you’ve got your heavy and light attacks, your dodge-roll, block, parry, and healing items that replenish upon death. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? I will note that dying is the only way to replenish the healing items, which is less than ideal, but this design is slightly balanced out, by the way, leveling up works. Rather than accruing “souls” or an equivalent whenever an enemy is slain, the player gets experience that is not lost upon death, and leveling up happens instantly upon reaching the appropriate experience threshold. In addition to providing stat points, leveling completely refills health, which creates an interesting risk-reward consideration where the player must choose between using up one of their very limited healing items or trying to kill just one more enemy in order to level up. This system is not perfect either, as dying is also the only way to reset enemy spawns, but in the natural flow of gameplay, it works well enough.
There is actually one major mechanic that sets Chronos apart from other Souls-likes, which is the character’s aging. Every time the player dies, their character gets a year older, explained in-game as the character not actually dying but rather needing to retreat and recover from their wounds for a year before giving their quest another shot. The player starts out as an eighteen-year-old, and as they get older three things happen: the appearance of the character changes at every age ending in a 5, they are able to select a new perk at every age ending a 0, and every so often the cost of increasing character stats changes. The appearance aspect ultimately has no impact on gameplay, but I still thought it was cool and thus worth mentioning.

The stat costs, on the other hand, I feel requires a small bit of elaboration. The player has four stats; strength, agility, arcane and vitality. Strength scales damage for strength weapons and increases the player’s ability to block, agility scales damage for agility weapons and increases the dodge window, arcane increases magic damage and defense, and vitality increases health. At age 18, all stats cost 1 point to increase except for arcane, which costs three. After enough deaths, arcane starts to cost fewer points while everything else starts to cost more, until eventually arcane costs only 1 while strength and agility cannot be further upgraded at all. This system simultaneously creates some very interesting potential for different builds while also making it easy to choose what to upgrade if you want to get the most out of your character simply by prioritizing things when they are cheapest. Meanwhile, the perk system provides a similar degree of build diversity: though it is somewhat difficult to build around perks when you don’t know what the next one you unlock can be, they’re all powerful enough that they give excellent boosts to struggling players.
Oh, and don’t worry about having to start the game all over again after enough deaths. If you somehow manage to hit the max age of 80 – which is unlikely, as I was only in my fifties the first time I cleared the game – then the only perk option is “immortality”, which does not make you literally unkillable but does keep your character from aging any further, so you have as many tries as you need to finally get through.

Even beyond the gameplay, there’s plenty to enjoy here. The graphics are attractively stylized and properly convey a tone of grim-but-not-hopeless fantasy, a tone that is helped along by some extraordinarily cool setpieces. There were many points throughout the game where I had to stop and just look around for a minute while I processed the newest spectacle I’d been thrown headfirst into. The story carries a similar degree of conceptual and aesthetic creativity, though it is a bit more barebones and in many ways somewhat predictable. The ending twist is straight-up given away by one lore scroll you can find early in the game, and the fact that it can easily be overlooked doesn’t really make it any better. Still, the mounting feeling of dread I felt because I anticipated what would happen was entertaining too, so I suppose there’s something to be said for it either way.

I generally enjoyed my time with Chronos, but it’s not perfect. In a game where death is a common occurrence by design, one would expect/hope that the respawning process would be quick so as to preserve the flow of gameplay. Unfortunately, load times in Chronos are quite long, to the point that even I was bothered when normally that sort of thing doesn’t get to me at all. Aside from that performance is largely flawless, though I did get trapped in a corner a couple of times by enemies body-blocking me, thus making it impossible to avoid being killed by them. Finally, the enemies in one area of the game are characterized as violent, animalistic natives (albeit by characters well-established as immoral) complete with Mesoamerican-style pyramids and mummification traditions, which I was deeply uncomfortable with for reasons that should be obvious.
Missteps aside, Chronos: Before the Ashes is a fun title and an excellent way to make a game that was previously VR-only more accessible to those who for whatever reason don’t have access to VR. I zoomed through the roughly 10-hour campaign in less than two days, and now that I’m done with it I’m more interested in Remnant than ever before. 2020 has, for all its… many, many faults been kind to fans of the Souls-like genre, and Chronos is just another example of that.
Chronos: Before the Ashes
Chronos: Before the Ashes' biggest issues are some questionable story decisions, and even those aren't wholly damning.
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Gameplay
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