Among Ashes – PS5 Review

Good lord, this is clever.  On the face of it, Among Ashes is a survival-horror game that takes the genre right back to it’s Resident Evil-era roots.  Crafted by Rat Cliff Games, a Spanish Studio that’s mostly led by Daniel Ferrer, this horror game took us on a far more interesting journey than we first expected.

You play as a gamer in 2001 who is playing a Doom clone when his session is interrupted by his friend, Mark, on a sort of fake version of MSN Messenger.  Mark tells you about a free horror game he’s been playing called Night Call.  You have to go to a forum (remember those?) to download the game as posted by its developer, David.  Ominously, the file is called ImSorry.exe.  But anyway, you fire it up and, for most of Among Ashes, this is what you’ll be playing.

Night Call is an obvious riff on the original Resident Evil.  You play as a policeman who is there investigating reports of a screaming woman over at the Stoker Mansion.  Upon attending, with your partner Amy, it becomes apparent that something is off about the house and its inhabitants.  It’s the usual tale of a man who has pushed his science experiments too far and unleashed a zombie-like infestation.  All the hits are there.  From the lobby with the large staircase, the hidden lab, the maze-like gardens and a myriad locked doors that require either keys or puzzle solutions to get through.

The game, much like the overall game, is in first-person, thankfully.  We’re glad they avoided the old tank controls but in terms of quality of life improvements that’s all you get here.  Night Call is as old-school as it gets with manual saving, limited ammo, dark torch-lit environments and all the miserable trappings of survival horror as we used to play it.  And, if that’s all there was to Among Ashes, we’d be giving the game a charitable five out of ten with all the positives coming from the creepy nature of the game, the late ’90s styling somehow adding to the feeling of unease that it generates.

But, Among Ashes is way more than that.  As you play the game, Mark sends you links to stories and forum posts shedding more light on the game.  This came into play fairly early when we got hopelessly stuck on one part of the game.  We even reached out to the developer of the game as we just couldn’t get past this one bit even though we were sure we’d figured out the right solution.  In the game, Mark links you to a forum post that is from Night Call‘s developer, David, who is saying that one bit of code to do with that solution keeps undoing itself and it gives the answer.  Very, very clever.  We fell right into that one.

As you progress through Night Call, things start to go a bit strange in the main game.  You’re alone in your flat and suddenly odd things start to happen.  From random noises, doors opening, radios turning on and a whole lot more, it becomes apparent that Night Call is affecting the real world.  This builds and builds to the point where you have to do things in your flat that then affect things in Night Call, adding an additional dimension of puzzle solving.

It works brilliantly.  Moments of weirdness in either realm work cohesively, creating a larger dynamic that makes Among Ashes feel like an experience.  It’s Eternal Darkness-like in how it all messes with you as a player but it’s also messing with the 2001 player too.  And while there’s the danger that all this reality-shifting could be disorienting for modern gaming audiences, Among Ashes holds it all together very well.  We kept getting caught out by its tricks and every time we fell for one, we just felt absolute joy.  Unfortunately, the main game isn’t free of bugs either though and we did have one completely stop us in our tracks until a patch dropped on PSN this morning to allow us to get past it and finish the game.

The only real limitations on how good this all is come down to the fact that Night Call is just so very clunky.  There’s also a sequence of maze chases in the last third that we found to be absolutely exhausting and were relieved to get past.  And there are some unintentional bugs in the physics that see key graphics disappear and enemies start floating, which did spoil things a little.  Also, while the visuals are deliberately primitive in those sections, the modern visuals outside of Night Call aren’t all that good either.

But look, a lack of polish – both technical and in the presentation – isn’t great but what Among Ashes manages to achieve is sort of spectacular.  It’s a triumph of lateral thinking and storytelling.  It manipulates you as a player and had us genuinely on edge for large sections of the game.  It all resolves with a compelling reason for this to all be happening too, elevating the story from the usual mad scientist nonsense into a disturbing tale of familial dysfunction and loss.

There’s probably a lot more to criticise here but, honestly, none of that matters.  Among Ashes is just so unique and clever that while the execution might not be as polished as you’d hope from a PS5 title, the results are as good as any horror game on PSN right now.  This is special.