Survival games do not always hit home when it comes to narrative elements. Although titles like The Flame In The Flood manage to weave together strong character development and plot with resource management, all too often the survival game genre struggles to mesh its gameplay elements with cohesive storytelling, such as with We Happy Few. This is something that Ashwalkers, from developer Nameless XIII, is looking to address.
Ashwalkers is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, after a series of catastrophic geological disasters destroyed civilization. The player takes control of a team of four scouts sent out from one of the few bastions of humanity that is facing a crisis of its own, in a story setup similar to the first Fallout. The team are looking for the Dome of Domes: a fabled permanent place for the thousands of desperate survivors to call home.
The first thing most players will notice about Ashwalkers is its striking graphical style. Although many other games have gone for a black and white aesthetic, such as Limbo or Return of the Obra Dinn, it's still a rather effective option to choose, particularly with the occasional red accents to showcase wounds or bloodshed. Ashwalkers looks best in its still scenes rather than in motion, particularly the flickering shadows of the other inhabitants and creatures of the wasteland, where a lack of detail pushes the player to use their own imagination based on text descriptions.
Ashwalkers focuses on the player's narrative choices rather than on item gathering, although the latter is still important, with the player needing to maintain the team's warmth, hunger, health, and motivation on their perilous journey. Nonetheless, the emphasis on story is refreshing in a genre where resource grinding becomes a chore, leaving Ashwalkers more akin to Where The Water Tastes Like Wine or Out There. It's what you'd expect from a studio set up by Hervé Bonin, a founder of Life Is Strange studio Dontnod.
The game excels by giving the player variety in how they want to play. The player can be cautious, communicative, or aggressive with the nomads of the wasteland, with Ashwalkers giving the player a handy breakdown of their approach at the end of each section. Choices also tie into the strengths of the four squad members, with direct squad leader Petra, aggressive warrior Sinh, Kali the diplomatic scholar, and Nadir the stealthy scout all offering their own opinions on choices to be made.
Ashwalkers does a good job of fleshing out its world, with well-written text sections explaining the creatures of the ash wastes, as well as the culture of the survivors that the team meets along the way. The game doesn't entirely miss out on the sense of danger that other survival games have, either, through threatening moments like the darkness of a long-abandoned mine. Overall, however, the game is about making multiple journeys to witness its 34 different endings, and this lack of difficulty may not appeal to those after a challenge.
It can be frustrating at times, too. The player is unlikely to see many deaths on their team, providing they pay at least a little attention to resource gathering, but some sections will see them venturing into areas where they cannot rest yet will still see their team's hunger and fatigue rise. These moments will leave those team members with lower stats destined to die, unless a squad has pre-empted this eventuality - which isn’t possible on first playthrough of an area.
There are also some unfortunate awkward moments in its narrative options, too. Ashwalkers does a great job of making diplomacy a viable choice alongside brute force and stealth, which again is refreshing for a game set in the post-apocalypse, but some of the endings don’t seem to fit thematically with the choices that the player has made up to that point. This might leave them scratching their head as to how to get a 'better' ending, particularly given that some of the endgame story round-ups can feel quite brief in explanation.
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.
Ashwalkers releases today, April 15, 2021 for PC. Screen Rant was provided with a PC download code for the purposes of this review.