Ashen

Ashen is a 2018 action RPG developed by A44 and published by Annapurna Interactive, released December 7, 2018 for Xbox One and Windows, with PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch versions following in December 2019. It holds a Metacritic score of 81 on PC, 78 on Xbox One, and 71 on Switch, with an OpenCritic average of 80 (“Strong,” 81% of critics recommending it). It was the debut game from a small New Zealand studio, and its defining feature has nothing to do with bosses or level design: it’s one of the more distinctive multiplayer systems any Soulslike has attempted.

Rather than lobbies, invasions, or summon signs, Ashen pairs players anonymously and automatically. The stranger fighting beside you might just be an AI companion — or it might be another real person, playing the exact same role for you that you’re playing for them, with neither side ever told which.

Technical Specifications

A Three-Person Studio’s Xbox Reveal

A44 was founded in Wellington, New Zealand in 2013 by game director Derek Bradley and art director Leighton Milne, initially as a team of just three people. Ashen was unveiled at Microsoft’s E3 2015 press conference as an Xbox One console exclusive developed under the ID@Xbox independent publishing program — a significant early spotlight for a studio that size. Early design documents leaned more heavily into survivalist mechanics, including realistic geography and elemental hazards like wind actively helping or hindering the player, before the project settled into the more straightforwardly Soulslike shape it eventually shipped with. By launch, the team had grown from three people to roughly forty.

A World Without a Sun

Ashen is set in a world with no sun, its stark, low-poly landscapes lit instead by drifting ash and volcanic glow. Characters are rendered without faces — a deliberate stylistic choice A44’s creative director has attributed partly to wanting a painterly, impressionistic look, and one that had the practical side effect of avoiding the cost of full facial animation and lip-sync work for a studio of that size. It’s a look that drew consistent praise across reviews regardless of how they felt about the mechanics underneath it.

Strangers as Companions

The game’s signature idea, credited by A44 as directly inspired by Journey’s anonymous multiplayer, is a co-op system with no lobbies, invites, or visible matchmaking of any kind. At almost any point, the AI-controlled companion following the player can seamlessly be swapped out for another real player online — and crucially, that other player has no idea they’re anything other than an NPC to you, just as you appear as one to them. Neither side is told when this handoff happens, creating what several reviewers described as a genuinely strange, occasionally moving sense of connecting with a real stranger without a single word exchanged.

Vagrant’s Rest

Companions recruited out in the world can be brought back to Vagrant’s Rest, the game’s central hub, where they set up shops, crafting stations, and homes that visibly accumulate and develop the more of the world the player explores. Several reviewers drew direct comparisons to Dark Souls II‘s Majula or Suikoden‘s recruit-and-build castles, and the growing, increasingly lived-in settlement became one of the more consistently praised parts of the game — a rare Soulslike hub built around a sense of accumulating hope rather than isolation.

Story and Score From Outside the Studio

A44 brought in outside collaborators for two of the game’s key creative pillars: fantasy author Mark Lawrence, known for The Broken Empire trilogy, worked with the team on narrative structure and worldbuilding, while the band Foreign Fields composed the score — an unusual choice for a studio of Ashen’s size to bring in an established outside novelist and a full band rather than handling both entirely in-house.

Reception

Critics were generally positive, with GameSpot awarding it a 9/10 and IGN 8.5/10, both singling out the co-op system and Vagrant’s Rest as genuinely fresh ideas within an increasingly crowded genre. PC Gamer’s review was blunt about the game’s influences, writing that to say Ashen borrows liberally from FromSoftware’s Soulsborne series is an understatement — while still recommending it as a well-executed example of the formula. The most consistent criticism, echoed by user reviews as much as critics, was a lack of build variety: a small weapon roster limited mostly to axes, clubs, and spears, and a itemization system reviewers generally found thinner than genre benchmarks, even as they praised the combat feel and atmosphere built around it.

Where A44 Went Next

A44’s follow-up, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, released in July 2024 through publisher Kepler Interactive, moving away from Ashen’s minimalist co-op formula toward a more traditional single-player action RPG blending firearms and magic in a “flintlock fantasy” setting the team described as an underexplored subgenre. It landed to a similarly mixed-positive reception, with a Metacritic score in the low-to-mid 70s — broadly the same critical territory Ashen occupied six years earlier, suggesting a fairly consistent studio identity: distinctive ideas and strong presentation, held back somewhat by thinner mechanical depth than the genre’s biggest names.

Where to Play It Today

Ashen is available on Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, Xbox One/Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, and has periodically been featured on Xbox Game Pass since launch.