Review | Ashwalkers: A Survival Journey

Ashwalkers: A Survival Journey has nothing interesting to say, and takes forever not saying it. 

This is the only title released by new indie developer Nameless XIII and according to Gamasutra the game began as a student project before being picked up and published by 24 Entertainment and Dear Villagers. 

I played on a mid-range PC and while technically speaking the framerate never chugged too badly, the game required a manual force quit once. It’s the little things that feel sloppy in Ashwalkers; the pathfinding and walking animations of your party members can be jittery and they refuse to stay still in interlude moments, there can be a lack of clarity for inputs not helped by the wide variance in on-screen text sizes. It’s not enough friction to stop you from playing, but these issues add up and maybe distracting for some players. 

Come on guys. This is basically a beach vacation but, like, forever!

In Ashwalkers you control a band of four survivors as they travel out from their large community in search of a bigger, better haven for the population of their failing shelter in an ashen, post-apocalyptic world. The whole gameworld is realised in a grim, black and white monochrome to emphasise the world which is gray with thick volcanic, or perhaps nuclear, ash. Why the world is this way, how these havens, Domes, work and what are the natures and stories behind these little scouting parties are revealed through objects and dialogue found throughout multiple playthroughs of the campaign. 

Ashwalkers is very firmly set in the tropes of its genres; both as survival RPG and as post-apocalyptic fiction. You control a party of four small scouts who hike across a semi-abstracted, larger than life map picking up food, fuel, and medicine and occasionally encountering humans and animals which appear as a swirling black mist and pantomime scenes of typical post-apocalyptic encounters. These scenes and the choices you make in them are the most important part of the game. Almost every situation is some variation on the party coming across something, or seeing it in the distance, and you then decide what to do about it. Usually, you’ll choose from four different choices, each broadly mapping to Violence, Stealth, Diplomacy, or Logic and each choice represented by one of the characters in your party. You’ll also sometimes choose between one of two routes on your journey. 

While travelling between these moments of choice the player must manage each of the characters’ Hunger, Warmth, and Energy. This is the best part of the game. In order to address any of these three needs, you’ll have to camp which takes time and resources. Eating food and burning fuel for warmth are instantaneous, but to refill energy you must sleep and when you sleep someone has to take watch. All the while, some else in your group can forage in the local area for more supplies. Here’s where we meet the dice rolls. You might have one character resting while another takes watch and two more are sent out to scavenge. The game will then tell you if anything dangerous befell the camp or the scavengers and whether the scavengers found anything valuable in the wild. This is good fun because anyone who didn’t sleep loses energy, anyone who scavenges away from the fire loses warmth, and everyone gets hungrier. Plus, the chance of a dangerous encounter will go up or down as indicated by a HUD element in the “Schedule” menu where you’ll be making these decisions. 

Damn 5G sucks, we’re this close to a tower and I’m getting no reception.

All the input in Ashwalkers comes from the mouse, there is no controller support. You’ll just be clicking and sometimes clicking and dragging. To walk, you choose a spot and click on it. The game, regrettably, does next to nothing to indicate what is walkable territory and what isn’t. Going the wrong way on the map, with the game’s inalterable and quite low camera angle will sometimes lead to dead ends. When this happens you must rapidly click in the extreme foreground to cause the party to walk back toward the camera like Crash Bandicoot meets The Road. All the while your exhaustion and starvation meters are ticking away. Due to Covid I haven’t parallel parked in over a year but I can say confidently that it would be preferable to moving in this game. I appreciate the faith the designers have in the atmosphere of their world but it’s really not compelling or unique enough to carry this pace.

When I first booted up the game, I opted to go through the tutorial and finally completed it after force closing the application twice. From the end of the tutorial the game transitions to the end of the first beacon, the place of the game’s first scene where the party radios home and declares their intent. Here there is another multiple-choice which maps onto the game’s four approaches. I declared myself a diplomat and headed on. 

The landscape in black and white monochrome slowly rides past as we trudge along. At this point, I’m confused about the resources but I scoop up as many as I can. I flub my camping efficiency the first couple of times but then it starts to click. I’m given a choice between going west to an area filled with wild animals and east to a place where it would be easy to slip by unnoticed, I choose the stealthier path. Eventually, I see a grim mansion in the distance and mosey on towards it. When I reach the mansion is it miraculously human size, the JRPG world map scale world giving it a grandness on approach but without changing size its forced perspective-shrinks down to meet me with a Disney architectural flair. I enter. 

Maybe we should do a bit of spring cleaning… That might help.

I have to carefully navigate the situation presented to me: a tribe of “savages” (oh, we’ll address this language shortly) circles my group. I keep my weapons lowered figuring I’m outnumbered anyway. One speaks up demanding one on one combat by a chosen champion to win their respect. I agree, choosing my stealth character as my champion. And, here something interesting occurs. I find that by carefully reading the clues about my character and the description of the action in the space of two choices I manage to end the combat victoriously. I’m very satisfied. It was easy, maybe, as far as clue following goes, but it was only the first big challenge and it didn’t feel like Ashwalkers was talking down to me. The telegraphing of the right choices was sensible. This had the conversational volley of good tabletop roleplaying where I felt my character understood their world and made logical and meaningful choices in it. I felt this was a great start and played through the rest of the campaign in one sitting. 

About an hour later, I realised that either I am very good at the survival segments or the game was made such that the survival mechanics and their dice rolls simply don’t impact the multiple-choice scenes. It was my second playthrough when I had my first character death and learned that you can still choose the approach associated with their traits when you reach any of the “Four Choices” moments. 

Still, the final leg of my first journey was a great challenge as the core survival mechanics came to the fore. Between the murderous cold and no food, I was keeping my party alive by just giving them medicine, which I had a tonne of on account of never choosing to fight. At the end of the game, I was faced with a final choice, one I truly puzzled over. I had to decide what to do with an uncooperative AI which controlled the Dome I had chosen as a new home for my settlers. Then, after a lengthy epilogue about how I did pretty ok by them, I was shown an array of possible endings and awarded a little badge for the one I had chosen. When it returned me to the main menu the “Continue” option had been removed, I had to start from scratch. I like that.

It was the second journey into Ashwalkers that was truly revealing about what was going on here. I endeavoured to play it as differently as possible from my first journey to see where it would lead me. When I reached the first little scene and radioed home I proudly declared I would show no mercy and attack anyone I saw on sight. The operator on the radio cheered me on my murderous way and I turned around and started marching into the waste. It was here that the game started to drift away from me. Knowing how much was ahead of me, my pace felt slow, boring. I arrived at the first little scripted scene, a lone figure at a campfire. In my first playthrough, I befriended him and moved on, in this one I murdered him. The game then stated he was unarmed. This gave me pause after how enthusiastic the person on the radio had been about my ruthlessness. 

Remember the fork in the road where I took the stealthy path? This time I chose the path with the wild animals, I nearly got killed by a giant wolf I tried to fight. And every party member’s “Hope” score went down to zero immediately. Odd, I thought, are we not warriors? I left the beast’s den and turned the corner to see the mansion. What!? I went a different way! Fine, I will enter the mansion, this time bloody and with very low health. I was greeted by an identical showdown, though this time I chose to fight. I slew the Savages, however, they killed off two of my people. 

Ashwalkers had the gall to say “We won. But… at what cost?” I trudged on.

Soooooo… Who’s for s’mores?

In the next area was an encounter with a giant bird stalking around looking for carrion. I was dragged into a scene with it and was presented with the four choices. Even with my stealth character dead, I could choose the stealth option and it turned out exactly as it had before. What was, the first time, a timid march into the unknown I quickly learned was in fact static choices. Ashwalkers is Choose Your Own Adventure and it doesn’t change based on your choices. Meaning, presumably if you have the stomach for the movement mechanics you could find an “optimal” playthrough. The game suddenly felt as lifeless as its wasteland. 

My two remaining characters struggled forward a little ways before expiring from lack of food. RIP. 

About the Savages. 

The in-game text refers to any humans who live outside of the Domes as Savages. Sometimes they are given more specific designations, the above group was the “Hounds” and later on, I met some “Western Nomads.” Generally, they are just called “Savages” and they are consistently characterized as ignorant and unpredictable. Perhaps the writers of this game felt that this is simply how our Dome-dweller characters would think of outsiders and that we as the audience should understand that this is simply part of this harsh world. However, it doesn’t feel self-aware or satirical. Perhaps there is a Choice Path in the game where this gets called into question and explored thoughtfully, but I never saw that path. And that’s the problem, most players probably won’t play this game a second time due to the trudging pace, dismal atmosphere, and lack of meaningful roleplay. Therefore, most players will just encounter a racist characterisation of an enemy with no further consideration for its implications.

Ashwalkers is a half-considered, poorly optimized mess. It considers violence totally reprehensible in all cases despite presenting it as an equally valid story-telling option and either has absolutely no qualms with or somehow walked backwards into casual racism. It simulates the feeling of roleplay without any meaningful player expression. I doubt it will survive the winter.