2022-05-11 13:00 UTC · VG247
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn has been looking quite exciting since the moment of its reveal. Today, developer A44 unenvied what inspired the design of the game's world, and how a small team could create such detailed characters and environments. The developer based Flintlock's original fantasy open world on its native New Zealand. The game has three major diverse zones, each offering a new environment inspired by locales of the beautiful country - from deep caverns to mountainous peaks. Rewarding exploration is major goal for A44 when designing Flintlock's world, so it won't just look pretty.
2019-12-09 19:26 UTC · PC Gamer
A little over a year ago, action RPG Ashen from AA4 and Annapurna Interactive was one of the most wishlisted games on Steam. That changed abruptly when Ashen became one of the first Epic Games Store limited exclusives, along with Supergiant Games' RPG Hades, which pushed back its Steam release by a full year. That year has come and gone (somehow) and Ashen is now available on Steam and GOG. (Hades launches on Steam tomorrow).  As you might expect for a game that's been out on another platform for a year, Ashen is discounted 20% on both sites, though it remains at full price on E
2019-10-24 16:00 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Brendan Caldwell)
Game DNA is a series where we take a single concept from games, strip it to its essence, and look at how it — and we — have developed over time. I was homeless when I discovered Minecraft — not homeless in the street-sleeping sense, thankfully. Only in the sofa-surfing sense. I had a bed, even. The creaking cabin bed of two friends who took pity on me and let me crash for a few months in their house, while I sullied my fingertips with sambuca in a dank Yorkshire nightclub for part-time pound coins. My chin-scratching uni days had just ended, but I stubbornly refused to go b
2019-10-02 16:00 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Brendan Caldwell)
Sorry, definition nerds. Soulslike is a word now. Disgusting, I know, but this is how genres are made. Along comes a giant like Dark Souls that everybody won t stop bleating about and soon it has copycats. Before you know it, a swarm of like-minded games with sparse checkpoints and lethal attacks are scuttling around, leaving slime trails and biting your ankles for surprisingly massive damage. Ugh, soulslikes. But stoop low to appreciate these little monsters, and among them you ll find some very good games about dying. Here are ten of the best. (more…)
2019-09-04 19:27 UTC · Eurogamer
Developer A44's brooding co-op action-RPG, Ashen, is plopping its (no doubt sombre) expansion hat on next week with the arrive of its Nightstorm Isle DLC, coming to Xbox One and the Epic Store on Monday, 9th September. Nightstorm Isle, according to publisher Annapurna Interactive, sees players accompanying a mother on a quest to find her missing daughter - a search that will lead the pair into the depths of new location Nightstorm Isle. "Countless horrors lurk below," says Annapurna, "yet nothing will prepare you for the ancient evil they imprison." There's a taste of the terrors to come in th
2019-08-28 18:53 UTC · Eurogamer
Following a year of Epic Games Store and Xbox One exclusivity, developer Aurora44's brooding co-op action-RPG, Ashen, will be shaking off its shackles and heading to PlayStation 4 and Switch on 9th December - and it'll be arriving on Steam and GOG the same day. Ashen wonderfully stylish fantasy action blends stamina-based third-person melee combat and open-world exploration, and casts players forth on a journey out across a bleak, time-ravaged world. While on their travels, adventurers can encounter and recruit comrades to help them tackle Ashen's challenges, defeat imposing bosses, and expand
2019-08-26 17:03 UTC · PC Gamer
A44's broody, beautiful Souls-like Ashen will drop its Epic Games Store exclusivity and make its way to other digital storefronts in December, one year and a little change after it was unveiled as an EGS launch title—which is also when the yearlong exclusivity period was announced.  Ashen will be available on both Steam and GOG December 9 according to a trailer released today, which you can view above. While it's true that Ashen cribs liberally from Dark Souls' mechanics, it is tonally very much its own game. It puts you in the shoes of a wanderer, and as you explore
2019-01-08 13:00 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)
I went into Ashen with certain expectations. Not of quality, but of mood. It sets out its Dark Soulsbut stall right away, with talk of disasters and darkness and god-level menaces, and so I shifted my brain into the familiar gears of isolation and doomy solitude. These, experience has taught, are lonely adventures in hostile places only the broken corpses will ever witness my successes and failures, and the world will not care if I live, die or die and die and die again. A night drive on a lost highway, no other car but mine. Except… That didn t happen. The expected coldness welcome as i
2018-12-18 12:39 UTC · PC Gamer
Some people will argue the 'Soulslike' label needs to die. They'll tell you it's overused, hackneyed and that there are other catch-all terms to describe hybrid ARPGs, which don't rely on comparison, even when it's the best fit. I think these people are wrong. Ashen, a low-fantasy action role-player developed by A44 and published by Annapurna Interactive, closely echoes many of the ideas and systems found in From Software's Dark Souls series. It knows exactly who its audience is, and, for all intents and purposes, is a Soulslike game. And it's a bloody g
2018-12-17 17:00 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Brendan Caldwell)
Developer: A44 Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Release: December 7, 2018 On: Windows From: Epic Price: 35, $40, 40 If you re summoning Dark Souls, you have to be prepared to make a deal with the Capra Demon. In this pact, you will be granted the power of From Software s ideas, yes, but you will also be doomed to comparison. You ll only be seen in the light of that which came before. Ashen has made such a pact, and it invites that comparison especially often. It sticks so closely to the Souls formula it could be a dream Hidetaka Miyazaki once had. But lapsed hollows who look closely will als
2018-12-13 19:00 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (RPS)
Look out. The year 2018 is going down in a storm. There are hundreds of games aboard, running, jumping, trying their best to survive the maelstrom. But there s only one tiny lifeboat, and only enough room for three games. It falls on the sorry shoulders of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, to decide which trio of games clamber onto the life raft and which games drown and become lost to history. (more…)
2018-12-13 11:21 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matt Cox)
If you’ve been struggling to hook up with ghost pals in newfangled Soulsian RPG Ashen, you should give your dating profile an overhaul. If you’ve just been trying to play the videogame with them, then good news! Developers Aurora44 have fixed an issue preventing some players from accessing multiplayer, leaving them stuck with AI companions rather than a humans. That’s good, because co-op in the Dark Souls vein (where a silent stranger appears and you occasionally bow at each other) is one of Ashen’s key selling points. All the other selling points also involve being a l
2018-12-11 14:40 UTC · Eurogamer
UPDATE 12/12/18: It looks like Ashen's PC multiplayer woes are over, as A44 Games has announced the issues plaguing the game since launch have now been fixed. A new patch is currently available to download from the Epic Games Store, and should help resolve the connection issues experienced by players over the past few days. Along with the update, A44 Games has also created an FAQ page to help players navigate the game's multiplayer elements, many of which had been causing confusion. Although it took them a few days to figure it out, A44 Games has at least been pretty good at keeping players up
2018-12-07 14:32 UTC · Rock, Paper, Shotgun · contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
In case you hadn’t gleaned this detail from today’s many posts mentioning games launching on Epic’s Store: Epic’s new digital games store has now opened for business. While their “hand-curated set of games” only includes four you can actually buy right now, one of them is the surprise new game from the makers of Bastion and that’s not a bad coup. Epic Games have managed to wangle some other upcoming hot exclusives too, including PlayStation darling Journey and Coffee Stain’s first-person factory-builder Satisfactory (which has scrapped its plan
2018-12-07 05:00 UTC · PC Gamer
In the opening scenes of the game a god-sized magic bird explodes and brings sunshine back to the world. Congratulations, you’ve won! Sort of. The holy light still needs to be protected and you, a rando with a stick, are the one to do it. Defending the light involves lots of locking on, dodging through sweeping enemy blows, and executing light and strong attacks until the red health bars are all gone. It’s Dark Souls, everybody. Instead of bonfires you have magic rocks. Instead of an Estus health flask you have a ‘Crimson Gourd’ that restores every time you rest at
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