Ashwalkers

My first hour with Ashwalkers felt like reading a beautifully illustrated graphic novel someone had left out in the ash. You guide four survivors - Petra, Sinh, Kali, and Nadir - across a world smothered by geological catastrophe, point-and-clicking through biomes that look like pencil-sketch fever dreams rendered in strict monochrome, with jolts of red arriving only when things go badly wrong. The Toulouse-based team at Nameless XIII is a young studio backed by Dontnod co-founder Herve Bonin, and that lineage shows in the confidence of the world-building, even if the mechanical side of the game never quite matches the visual ambition. At its core, this is closer to a choose-your-own-adventure book than a survival sim. You manage the squad's warmth, hunger, health, and morale as you walk toward a mythical sanctuary called the Dome of Domes, but the real weight sits in the text-based decision points scattered along the route. Do you fight the strangers blocking the road, negotiate, or slip around them in the dark? Save the nomad child from the vultures and you might earn tribal goodwill that smooths the next leg of the journey. Let your people rest at camp and they open up, each one carrying a backstory that only surfaces through those quiet, earned conversations. The survival layer is deliberately accessible - resources tend to appear when you need them, difficulty ramps gently across biomes rather than punishing you early - which is either a relief or a disappointment depending on what you came for. Critics are divided on this point, with some finding the management loop satisfying in its simplicity and others feeling it never generates real stakes. What nobody argues about is the soundscape and the art. The droning, sparse audio wraps around the monochrome environments in a way that makes the silence feel inhabited. Six distinct biomes shift the mood without breaking the visual grammar, and the creature silhouettes that flicker at the edge of the screen are more unsettling for what they withhold than anything a more detailed engine would render. Each run clocks in around two hours, which means the promise of 34 endings is genuinely approachable rather than theoretical. That said, be honest with yourself about the number: reviewers note that the 34 outcomes are variations clustered around a smaller set of true divergences, and the in-between walking stretches can drag across multiple playthroughs once the novelty of the world has settled. The honest tension in Ashwalkers is between what it wants to be and what some players need it to be. Narrative-first players who treat this like a moody interactive fiction piece - the kind who savored Where the Water Tastes Like Wine or Out There - will find something genuinely affecting here, especially across a second or third run when earlier choices ripple in unexpected ways. Players seeking a punishing resource grind or meaningful combat will leave cold. The control scheme attracted some complaints at launch, particularly around menu navigation, and the custom font can be hard to parse in low-contrast segments. None of it is game-breaking, but it adds friction to an experience that already asks for patience. With a Metacritic sitting at 62 and Steam user reviews landing in "Mixed" territory, Ashwalkers is a game that has found its audience - it is just a smaller, more specific one than the survival genre label implies.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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