Remnant: From the Ashes

Remnant: From the Ashes sits in an interesting corner of the genre map: part Souls-influenced action RPG, part third-person shooter, with a procedurally shuffled world that gives it more replay legs than you might expect from a 2019 mid-budget release. You play as one of the last survivors of a civilization wrecked by a hostile interdimensional force called the Root. The setup is thin on paper, but the world-building fills in through environmental storytelling, lore items, and NPC conversations at Ward 13, your makeshift home base. It is not Disco Elysium in terms of narrative richness, but for a shooter RPG it does more than the minimum. The core loop is: gear up, travel through procedurally arranged biomes, kill increasingly nasty bosses, grab their materials, craft new weapons or mods, repeat. The three starting archetypes (Ex-Cultist, Hunter, Scrapper) shape your early playstyle through trait bonuses and starting gear, but the real build expression comes from weapon mods. Mods are slotted active abilities, and combining them with armor passives and stacked trait points creates genuine build variety that holds up well past the first playthrough. A Hunter stacking long-range crits plays completely differently from a Scrapper running aggressive sustain and melee hybrids. The boss designs are the clear highlight: many have hidden kill conditions, alternate phase triggers, and secret item drops tied to how you interact with them mid-fight. That layer of discovery is where the game earns its reputation. Co-op for up to three players is where Remnant is most comfortable. The game scales enemy health and behavior to player count, and the combination of friendly fire awareness and role-based builds makes coordinated runs genuinely satisfying. Solo is absolutely viable, but some boss encounters feel tuned with co-op pressure in mind, and you will notice the difference during a few of the later fights. The procedural world generation means that co-op partners may be seeing different area layouts or even different boss encounters on their campaigns, which adds a light social element to comparing notes. The weaker parts are harder to ignore if you are coming in primarily as an RPG player. The story barely threads a coherent arc, and most of the named NPCs at Ward 13 exist to hand you quests or sell you materials rather than carry dramatic weight. The filler content between major bosses occasionally overstays its welcome, with corridor-heavy zones that funnel you through waves of the same Root variants without much mechanical surprise. The loot also clusters around a smaller palette of meaningful upgrades than the weapon count implies, so crafting can feel like you are unlocking variety rather than chasing genuine power spikes. If you are here for a rich character narrative with payoff per dialogue tree, manage expectations. That said, for what it actually commits to being, Remnant delivers a well-constructed loop with enough hidden content and alternate boss outcomes to justify multiple campaigns. The Adventure Mode added post-launch lets you reroll individual biomes without resetting your full campaign progress, which is a smart design call that respects your time. The community spent years documenting secret boss interactions and alternate item paths, which tells you something about the depth underneath the shooter surface. If you have two friends who like punishing co-op and enjoy theorycrafting gear loadouts, this one will run long.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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