The sun shines down on the bustling market. Your daughter and you walk amidst the hustle and bustle of merchants in search of a perfect birthday gift for your wife. Suddenly, everything around you is chaos! Bodies litter the streets, hopes and dreams turned to ashes. The culling has begun! It’s from here that AurumDust‘s story-driven RPG, (with rogue-like elements) Ash of Gods: Redemption, kicks off. Blending together elements from card deck buildings games, tactical turn-based combat and choose your own adventure novels, the game has a lot of potential.

Gameplay

In Ashes of Gods, your primary job is to lead a band of ragtag survivors to safety, whilst managing your resources and battling foes you encounter on your way. The game functions with an overworld map where you choose to travel to different locations and trigger encounters (much akin to the popular space simulator Faster than Light). Some areas trigger visual novel-style cutscenes where you can explore the environment, converse with characters, and take decisions that alter your storyline and team.

When combat triggers, it takes you to a screen where you can customize your party, managing their item loadout and configuring your card deck. Then the battle is afoot! Combat is then turn-and-grid-based. Your team of fighters and that of the enemy will take turns to go at each other’s throat, and do so by using a various combination of the cards in your hand, their class abilities, items etc. Interestingly, you use both your health and your magic meter to cast abilities, so certain moves will leave your own fighters weaker but may save you the day. It’s a nice touch and adds a strategic layer to the combat. Animations are good enough and more are on the way. Overall the system provides solid combat and mechanics, although some of these battles can become a little repetitive, especially after you decide on a fighting style you like and that works. This may adjust depending on the characters you choose to bring with you, but from my playthroughs, it needed a bit of spicing up after several battles.


Tactical turn-based combat by the gate

Look and Feel

Overall, this game's art style and colour palette are a gorgeous experience for the eyes and ears. It carefully complements the geography and world design. The style has a painted feeling to them and evokes a style like that of visual novels. Sound design is very well composed with music tracks vibrant with atmosphere and feel. They have managed to emphasize the themes of “desperate measures” and “forlorn hope”.


Even the Travel Map is gorgeous

The Story

The story of Ash of Gods takes place in a world where humanity is on the verge of a purge by a mysterious enemy. The game follows three separate protagonists as they attempt to withstand the world’s equivalent of Ragnarok. There is a strong focus on narrative and under-pressure choice-making which will have long lasting consequences and I found, at times, that some of these were a bit jarring to the narrative, as some of the choices were essentially exactly opposite to how I believe the character would behave based off their previous characterisations (which is a good indicator the writers have given their characters life). At the end of the day however, how you keep your band of survivors alive is entirely up to you, even if you want to force your characters down newer darker paths.

The main disappointment of the game is the translation. It's almost immediately apparent that it was originally in another language (with little tell-tale translation gremlins creeping into speech patterns). Consequently, the writing could most assuredly use a quality check. In the time I spent playing it, the characters and writing occasionally failed to grip me the way I expected it to, with the poor translations often making the interactions fell off and generic.

This seemed to worsen as the game progressed, which may imply that they were slowly working through the dialogue with an editor and “weeding” out any issues. One can only hope they patch it up to a better standard.


Fear the Reaper

Final Thoughts

For those who love roguelike story-driven RPGs with lots of choice and consequences coupled with strategic combat, this is your game. The dialogues and some of the choice options could be both better translated and perhaps written with a bit more panache, but they are not so awful as to ruin the entire game. In short, Ash of Gods: Redemption is a game to keep in your checklist if you enjoy turn based combat, rogue-like elements, moral dilemmas, enticing art style and a solid story to boot.