Of Ash and Steel

My first instinct with Of Ash and Steel was protectiveness. A small studio, Fire and Frost, swings for something deeply unfashionable: a low-fantasy, no-quest-marker RPG in the spirit of Gothic and the early Piranha Bytes catalogue, built in Unreal Engine 4 and published through tinyBuild. The soul is absolutely there. You play as Tristan, a cartographer shipwrecked on the island of Grayshaft, who starts the game barely able to swing an axe without draining his stamina bar entirely. There is no hero origin. There is no opening cutscene handing you a destiny. You wash ashore, meet a veteran named Nerest who becomes your reluctant guide, and then the world opens up in a way that feels genuinely rare right now. The map starts blacked out. There are no waypoints, no yellow paint, no objective arrows. Quests ask you to pay attention to NPC dialogue and written notes, then go figure it out yourself. When it works, this design produces a very specific kind of quiet joy. Stumbling through the underbrush and falling into a puzzle dungeon, finding a full ship embedded in a mountainside with no marker leading you there, these are the moments the game was built for. The faction choice, picking between the Order of the Seven (a religious knight order offering heavy armor and defensive builds) or the Free Hunters (agility-focused survivalists), is permanent and affects questlines and endings, which gives the whole run real stakes and a second-playthrough pull. Combat involves three stances, Quick, Power, and Balanced, each tuned for different weapon weights and stamina strategies, from rapier builds to heavy-armor knights. Skill progression is gated behind finding mentors willing to teach you, which gives leveling a social texture most modern RPGs have abandoned. But here is where I have to be honest with you, because I do care about the small team that made this. The launch state of Of Ash and Steel was genuinely harmful to the experience. Multiple reviewers reported save-file corruption after eight to ten hours of play, crashes that wiped all progress, and quest-breaking glitches that stacked up rather than charmed. The stamina-locked combat animations frustrate even players sympathetic to the genre, enemy AI pathfinding regularly breaks escort objectives, and loading times on solid-state drives drew widespread complaints. The visuals skew toward PS3-era fidelity, which lands somewhere between retro-homage and genuine limitation depending on your tolerance. The community reception reflected this split clearly, with overall Steam scores sitting in mixed territory at launch, though more recent reviews have trended positive as patches have improved stability. The generosity the game deserves is conditional on version. If patches have addressed the save corruption and the worst of the quest-breaking bugs, Of Ash and Steel earns a genuine recommendation for anyone who grew up with Gothic, Risen, or Elex and misses the feeling of a world that does not care whether you find it. The 45-plus hours of main story content, the unmarked catacombs and puzzle dungeons scattered across Grayshaft, and the blacksmithing system that lets you forge custom swords from component parts all point toward a studio that genuinely loves this genre. The Arena Master mode, a standalone combat challenge outside the main story, adds a little extra for players who want to stress-test their builds. The craft is there. The intention is unmistakable. The execution needed more time in the fire.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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