As the game opens and you have your initial few encounters with The Monster, the atmosphere in this is fantastic. And for as long as The Monster exists primarily as an indeterminate threat to police and punish your general noise pollution, it's a perfectly decent threat factor with which to throttle your forward progress and set an oppressive mood. The issue is that the further you get into the game, the more readily it begins to spawn in for no particular rhyme or reason, at which point your options are basically to hide somewhere and cross your fingers that you don't run afoul of the dice roll that determines if The Monster idly decides to just completely destroy your hiding place or not. A physical encounter with it will seemingly 4 out of 5 times lock you into an instadeath animation, while there's the odd instance where you might be able to get away with just one bad laceration if you're nimble enough. There are wonderfully tense encounters with this thing... spaced out amidst another half-dozen encounters where I just die instantly or twiddle my thumbs in the corner for 5 minutes waiting for it to despawn because it's untenable to waste the resources that are required to manually drive it off, and attempting to accomplish anything while it's present is tantamount to suicide with how abruptly it can relocate itself from point A to point B. It's the classic problem of overexposure. The threat of death and lost progress is scary. Actually dying and losing progress over and over, or alternatively cowering in the dark motionless for several minutes at a time, is not. I spend more time doing either of those than actually making forward progress. I get why it's happening; the map is remarkably small and the game would probably be over inside of an hour or two if The Monster didn't make such a constant insufferable nuisance of itself. The best part of the game is ironically right before the endgame where you're suddenly able to briefly visit a new setpiece free of your usual antagonist's omnipresent bother. It's still a fairly novel gameplay loop. It was an interesting experiment. I just don't think it worked very well.
Here we are seven years on, and I can fully believe that that entire time was spent immaculately crafting this game to Team Cherry's dream specification. The music, presentation, atmosphere, art, my GOD the art. It's Hollow Knight again and polished to even more of a mirror sheen this time. I love all the environments and silly little bugs milling around, there's so much I love about its presentation. Regrettably it's also quite easy to believe that this is a game that three people spent seven years practicing and tuning in private. You'll be able to get into the game, sure, but did you beat all the superbosses and finish all the pantheons back in Godhome? Because that seems to be the difficulty FLOOR for Silksong. Everything starts doing 2 damage so the 1 health upgrade you can get before the second act is useless, most of the bosses just plain take too long even on a successful run with massive health pools and occupy half the screen while dealing 2 damage even on contact. The REALLY bad ones also summon trash mobs endlessly... and most often it'll take at least twice as long to run back from the nearest bench as it will to die again to the boss that facestomped you the last 30 times. The farther you get into the game the more frustrating it gets. The never-ending biomes with the worst omnipresent poison mechanic ever devised that play more like something a trashpost game parodying Dark Souls would make as a joke. The tools that are limited per-use between save points, but also consume a secondary currency which exists purely as a solution in search of a problem. Every bench, every fast travel, every THING costs massive chunks of a currency that only some enemies drop and you'll always be skint on until quite a bit later into the game. Half the arenas are just endurance runs against 5 waves of the also-overtuned standard mobs including plenty of evasive, back-dashing, projectile-spamming flyers that don't even drop currency now just to ensure the encounter is a COMPLETE waste of your time. I *almost* managed to finish Godhome back in the day, I just ended up losing my patience with the worst boss (Uumuu). I finally hit my stopping point in Silksong around 30 hours in when an endurance room lasted for about 12 consecutive rounds including throwing three bosses into the mix. There's a constant stream of "gotchas" here that exist purely to spite the player, seemingly because it's thematically suitable that you're exploring a living world that actively wants you dead as opposed to a dead world that just lashes out in passive reflex to any living presence. I could keep putting myself through this but I haven't been having fun since the 8 hour mark and it's only getting worse. Silksong has been overtuned to hell and back and it's the kind of punishing that even fans of the original might not be able to stomach. It's the kind of punishing that even some Souls players, and half the people who manage to enjoy and finish this game, will still openly admit is "excessive". The only possible circumstance in which it is "a good jumping-on point for new players", as it was allegedly intended, is maybe specifically if you're a Bloodborne fan or you dropped Hollow Knight because you were bored with your exploration NOT being broken up by two-thirds of all trash mobs having the balancing of a miniboss encounter. I can barely call this a metroidvania anymore with how you have to buy your way forward at every step of the way, and every single enemy demands absolute locked-in focus just to survive basic traversal. I'd call it a soulslike but even most of the Souls audience seems to disavow the comparison. I'm not sure what to call it other than a very pretty, very deliberately crafted test of one's patience.
There are about a zillion mods out there for OG Doom 1+2 at this point; new mechanics, weapons, enemies, levels, entire campaigns, and even a surprising number of total conversions. Having said that, Ashes is probably somewhere in the top 10 for most people - like, encompassing everything, not even just campaigns or TC's. I won't claim it's some kind of revelatory or expectation-defying experience; it's not a Russian Overkill, Guncaster, Reelism, or Abort. It's just a really well made TC campaign, up there with Adventures of Square, The Golden Souls, or the rare commercial offshoot like Hedon though I'd say it gives even those a run for their money. Mad Max-adjacent worldbuilding, weapons feel punchy, levels have really solid design. Give it a try.
Look, I respect the glow-up this game has gone through as much as the next guy. It FUNCTIONS now. ...mostly. It finally fulfills most of the promises it made on launch. And while there's a hundred and one new things you can work towards, the issue is that half of those things barely work as advertised if at all, and the core gameplay loop never really graduates from "go here, hoover up eight tons of resources by clicking on them, and use them to make more and fancier stuff". I enjoy plenty of grindy games, but the grind needs to feed back into the game's other systems and vice-versa in a meaningful way. NMS is notably lacking in that department, so no matter how much cool junk I unlock it always just ends up feeling hollow and performative. The game not crashing to desktop every 20 minutes is about the only improvement made since launch that actually affects how much enjoyment I'm able to get out of it.
The first thing I noticed playing this is that the dash function feels schizophrenic; while grounded it gives you a short boost in whatever direction you're moving, in the air it gives you bullet time and an optional sideways juke, then boosts you in the direction you're aiming regardless of movement. It feels like two separate abilities that should never have been merged, and if you're ever trying to use it while close to the ground you'd best hope you aren't slightly off the ground if you meant to be grounded or vice versa, or you'll almost certainly die instantly. The next thing I noticed is the brutality and inconsistency of the combat and parkour; sometimes it feels like I drop dead apropos of absolutely nothing, occasionally shots seem to phase right through me but far more often than not I get to deal with somehow being cut down by a single bullet mid-dash even while traveling perfectly perpendicular to the projectile. Sometimes my idiot character will attempt to latch onto a ledge instead of wallrunning, sometimes walljumping just spits me off at an unrecoverable downwards angle for no apparent reason, some parts are generously checkpointed while others will funnel me through a 2-5-minute marathon of one-hit KO BS until I manage to execute the entirety of it flawlessly some 30 attempts later. There were also odd occasions of me clipping through geometry to my death, but the jank was overall tolerable... until I got to the mandatory tutorialization of the first unlockable ability, the Blink. You need to use it to cut through clusters of 3 placeholder enemies at a time to continue the game, but every time I do so it resets me and respawns the targets, telling me to try again. I'm softlocked. I am well versed in and completed Meat Boy, Mirror's Edge, AND Shadow Warrior, but gameplay-wise this feels like one of the worse potential outcomes of melding all three. Which is a shame because the aesthetic and premise were both really grabbing me.
