Ashwalkers: A Survival Journey

An interesting twist on the survival genre. A point and click adventure with a very original black and white style and a branching story telling that leads to a number of different endings.

Ashwalkers has it’s issues with pacing during some of its more severely-weathered environments, but, even so, it stands as an immensely moody survival-lite game that tells its story of desperation, loneliness, and even hope surprisingly well.

Seeing it through the prism of the old Oregon Trail, I enjoyed Ashwalkers and its myriad of tough, meaningful choices. Its heavy material and its dreary art style doesn't make it a game that I plan to revisit very often. I can appreciate the variety of scenarios, especially the idea that players can select different starting points after multiple playthroughs. In that sense, it's unlike a lot of survival games out today and worth playing through at least once.

Ashwalkers provides a great first impression through its atmosphere and mechanics, but each playthrough weighs on that experience. The repetitive nature of this adventure simply has you playing until you wear yourself out after so many of the different endings are similar to each other. These 2-hour game loops had me wishing for longer paths or something else because there’s a good foundation here but it’s repetitive nature ultimately leaves the adventure unfulfilling.

While Ashwalkers has an interesting art style and atmosphere, it does little to capitalize on its survival mechanics, choice based narrative, and is far too easy for what it wants to be. While Ashwalkers may be worth a single playthrough, there’s not much to motivate repeat visits to this wasteland.

As it stands I finished the game without a lot of desire to repeat the journey to flesh out the many endings (34 in total). Because while there are enjoyable moments, it’s spread across a sparse and long hallway to move through. Ashwalkers has the bones of some good ideas. I’m hoping to see more from this studio as there are unique things to be found here, Nameless XIII just never really hits their mark. There are plenty of walking simulators out there that make you forget what they are. Ashwalkers, unfortunately, is not one of them.

In a world drenched in ash after a volcanic cataclysm, the Squad’s long and treacherous journey may have dashed most of their hopes for survival, let alone of achieving their goal of finding a new home. Ashwalkers led me to identify with the arduousness of its quest–a sadly drab journey overly invested in its destination, with more interesting moments spread out like notable landmarks. This sparsity left me wanting for more to grapple with here and now, rather than the promise of unlocking it later. The latter, it seems, feels like a gambit that doesn’t pay off.

Ashwalkers is still a fascinating little narrative experience. There's an interesting and at times surprisingly uplifting world to explore, and it's worth playing through the game multiple times to see where its branching pathways lead. That said, its brevity means that there's not quite enough meat on the bones to really envelop anyone in its atmosphere, which could leave some explorers wanting more.

The core game of Ashwalkers is a great, atmospheric experience that takes classics like The Oregon Trail and transports them to a vividly realised post-apocalyptic setting. Characters are nicely defined, resource management is clearly presented, and I genuinely wanted to find out more about the world and its inhabitants. However, the actual process of playing the game is just too slow and becomes boring after the first couple of runs. There is a good survival and choice-filled game here, but you have to walk a long long way to get to it.

Ashwalkers is nothing but a seedling of an idea that is struggling to grow in the fields of ash that surround it.

It will take you 3-4 hours to complete your first adventure in Ashwalkers, and after that you will realize that it should have ditched the out-of-balance survival layer and presented the story as a pure visual novel.

All style and very little substance, Ashwalkers feels as cold and lifeless as the world it portrays.

Ashwalkers really just isn’t an interesting experience. It takes the post-apocalypse and manages to make it soporific. I can’t really recommend it unless you’re looking for a unique way to cure your insomnia.