Among Ashes
Review
An ambitious horror experience where the deeper you dig, the more the lines between words dissipate.
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
A game within a game
There's no shortage of "game within a game" attempts out there. Sometimes it is a short gimmick, similar to Crash Bandicoot in Uncharted 4, other times they're longer and more surprising, like a 4K re-release of Timesplitters 2 in Homefront: The Revolution, or any variation in between. It is a concept that can easily inspire intrigue, but remains difficult to both pull off and justify. With its multilayered approach, Among Ashes attempts to use inspiration from these types of experiences, and fuse their best parts together in a world where the barriers between them break down after a time. Not content with this idea, the game adds additional and unexpected layers to the formula, and wraps it all in a story that attempts to justify its point of view and the existence of not one, but three games.
The Horror Of 2001
You start on a Windows XP-esque computer playing the latest knock-off of the world's hottest FPS: Doomed. You're so invested and zoomed in to the game that you can barely see the edges of your monitor, with your window to the rainy world outside at the very periphery. The impressive graphics and faithful gameplay of the game in front of you loses its lustre when you once again cannot beat the boss. Fortuitously, your friend Mark sends you an Awesome Messenger IM, and eventually introduces you to a new game mysteriously uploaded to a forum. Of course you're going to download it and join your friend in this experience.
From the outset, the amount of care put into Among Ashes is obvious. These analogues of Microsoft's long-dead operating system and messaging application can take you back pretty far, but the game's developers added the ability to dig into each of your friends' away messages and conversation histories — a nice, totally unprompted addition to a game about a haunted video game. The forum Mark sent you to so faithfully recreates the GeoCities feel, you'd almost miss the mini Goku GIFs. The ominous forum post is believable (simply labeled "I'm sorry" on a horror website), as is the conversation that follows and the act of downloading a random executable from a stranger on the internet. It gives you the sense that, besides your friend Mark, there are several of you in this tight-knit community that are looking to solve this mystery.
Going Meta
When you get into the game (which is actually called "Night Call") it makes an excellent case for being the focus of the experience. In this world and in reality, it is presented as this homage to "Resident Devil" and "Silent Mill," but in first-person because "horror is all about immersion." All of that is correct and appropriate. You play as officer King when he and his partner, officer Lovecraft, show up to this mysterious manor because of reports of a woman screaming. Inside, those inspirations become very clear, both from a graphical standpoint, and a gameplay one, while callbacks similar to these surnames also pop up from time to time. It is a game that knows what it is in both universes, but with some neat updates to the formula. When you run across a notepad to save your game, most times your character will comment that there's only "a couple of empty pages left," or something similar, to signal how limited this resource is at any time.
It's mostly era-appropriate-simple, from combat to puzzles, but with the added wrinkle that "glitches" have caused several puzzles to break. Instead of this being a gameplay element, it usually means that your buddy Mark will cut in with an IM detailing what the community has discovered to help them gain progress in the game. On every occasion, these messages came in before I even noticed anything was wrong, and most of those occurred before I even knew there was a puzzle to solve. It's a cool meta-layer, pseudo-ARG aspect that undercuts itself completely by revealing its hand before you even get to look at your own, ultimately following in the footsteps of other modern games that tell the player the answers before the questions.
The Deeper The Game, The Realer The World
With the help of both friends and strangers, you continue to unravel this story in Night Call, a game within that game (yeah, there's another layer), and outside of all of them in the real world, because this game affects your life. When stories of real-world spooks circulate, several players drop out, but these events make an interesting case for both you and your character to continue down this rabbit hole. While maintaining those revelations, there's a compelling purpose behind the creation of Night Call, the "haunting" associated with it, and the entire package, which dissolves into one experience as the game (Among Ashes, that is) progresses. Items you'll pick up in the real world begin to affect the game, and vice versa, in an almost-mind-bending way.
What keeps things separated, outside of your monitor bezels, is the fact that when you step away from the computer, because of some strange noise or paranormal event, you step into a fully realized, graphically impressive apartment straight out of a modern tech demo. It's jarring at first. I expected the real world to be polygonal as well, but near the experience's end, the game realizes some of Night Call's grotesque designs and styles in their ultimate form within your apartment, forcing you, or giving you the opportunity, to stare at them. Instead of dulling the horror of these monstrosities, prolonged viewings really give you the opportunity to focus on the nuance of these creepy creations. That's the broad philosophy of the horror in Among Ashes: horrific stories and understated terrors. Often these spooky ghosts in your apartment pop up in the periphery of your vision for a brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. No musical stinger, no jump scare. Not only is it my favorite kind of (maddeningly rare) horror, it's the least-grading, most unnerving way for the two worlds to gradually blend together.
Going Home Again
While things come together in the end, with a satisfying conclusion to the story with answers to the biggest questions, it stumbles a few additional times in the lead-up to the conclusion. A few times, Night Call devolves into a series of chase sequences where you're tasked with running through a maze-like series of tunnels with little-to-no guidance. Other times it throws more enemies at you than the combat can reasonably account for, especially considering how "survival horror" it is about doling out ammo and health items. There are also some extremely minor aspects of the story that are left open or give unsatisfying answers. The elements of your friend Mark and the forum users could have been truly fertile ground for teasing out story beats or horrors a little better, rather than existing as a force-fed guide to completing parts of the game for the first half, and ending up in a much more satisfying backstory of Night Call’s developer towards the end. What Among Ashes does well, though, it does really well. It fully justifies the format while telling an uncomfortable real world story about trauma, an unsettling meta story about being a victim, and a wild "survival horror" story about a madman in a mansion all at the same time. At the end, I found something extremely memorable, with some visuals that are easily some of my favorites of the year, in a package that is good as-is, but would be great if only expanded in scope.
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7.5
fun score
Pros
Great horror that largely avoids jump scares, knows what to show and what to obscure, and blends multiple stories and layers together in a satisfying experience.
Cons
The dated gameplay gets overwhelmed by the design late, and it often prevents the player from experimenting with some of the purposely broken elements of the retro game before being given the solutions.
