Of Ash and Steel

I had my eye on Of Ash and Steel for a while as a possibly-worth-playing second- or third-tier RPG. I've enjoyed such before in spite of a certain level of jank that is expected. In this case, other things lined up such that I didn't come in until several patches into its lifecycle, which is probably a good thing as it cuts down on bugs.

The term I keep coming back to with this game is "high friction."

You can't even access the map screen until Act 2, then have to find survey points to reveal details, and even then I wish there was more labeling. There are zero quest markers and the directions given range wildly from semi-useful to "you should just look this up outside the game if you don't expect to lose hours searching." Traveling around is limited to running (technically some teleporters open up in Act 4), which is especially painful in the early game when you stamina is particularly low. Heck, you even fall down if running through puddles until you've done that enough to earn a perk that makes you immune. Many of these pain points easy a little as the game progresses, but it does feel like the game itself is fighting you along the way. I cannot recommend this for everyone by any means.

It doesn't help that the quest design is largely: "run way over there, do something or talk to someone, then come back - maybe multiple times." One particular section had me running back and forth so many times, that I started to see there are probably code reasons for some of this. Maybe the quest designers are just masochistic, but I think the game may require the player to be a certain distance away to change the state of things. If an NPC is supposed to die or sleep or something else, the game has to send you away so it can spawn the dead version when you come back. Similarly, enemies in the world change/respawn almost exclusively between acts.

Combat is serviceable. I've seen jankier, but it's not great. This may be compounded by the opaqueness of systems. I invested in the one-handed weapon skills because they said it unlocks stances, combos, and finishers only to later see posts saying those may not exist for rapiers (which I was using). Some enemies move around so much that the lock-on may be a detriment. Fighting more than one opponent gets to be very rough. It's actually been more effective at times to 1) lead enemies back to guards, particularly in the early game, or 2) get on a high point and plink away with arrows.

There is some level of charm in the story, though. It follows Tristan, a cartographer assigned to a voyage to one of the islands in a kingdom after contact with a couple other islands has been lost. The ship wrecks, the survivors are ambushed by some enemy force, and Tristan becomes the sole survivor charged with delivering a sealed letter... only to be ambushed by bandits. He's nursed back to health by a hermit of sorts and sets out to join a faction and regain the letter once returning home is out of the picture, running errands for people along the way to gain money (and XP).

He joins one of the two major factions on the island and eventually gets back onto the trail of the letter only to find it sealed by a magical sigil (when outright magic really hasn't been much of a thing to this point). With some work, it's unsealed and speaks of an upcoming danger after the other two islands fell. So your faction seeks to stabilize things to put up a defense and sends you off to the governor who, in turn, sends to you the island's primary mine to see why ore shipments have stalled.

The mine is a bit of a slog, as you're quarantined once there and have to go back and forth between abusive guards and miners for quite a while to get things in place to wrap up there. This gets some leads on the cult that seems to be a pre-invasion force on the island. In pursuing them, Tristan is exposed to an ancient tome that unlocks some ability to use "ancient knowledge," aka. magic. Tristan returns to the governor to report only to be accused of treason, sentenced to death, and sold off to a prison behind the scenes.

The mine was stifling, but the prison is a major mid-game depowering that I low-key hate. Tristan is stuck there a while and made to fight in an arena, picking up a scar, scruffier look, darker outlook, and going just by "Tris." The transformation is a bit on the edgy side, but it kind of works for someone who's been harassed since hitting the island and is now kind of over it. So, with his magic and a bit of guidance, he's able to active a portal and escape the prison with a couple others, landing smack dab in a bunch of wolves before even being able to reequip anything. Then it's hiking back to the faction leader.

And there comes one of the scenes that I most enjoyed, and of the sort I've wanted to see in other games: Tris comes in hot. Rather than just a heroic "I'm back, let's go save the world," Tris comes straight in with, "hey, I joined you guys for protection, you actually sent me before this guy, and I have been rotting in prison ever since!" And there's even sort of a reasonable explanation in reply, where it's explained back that the punishment for treason is immediate execution, they actually mobilized and were ready to stage a rescue when Tristan was brought out - but that never happened. They looked, but found no leads on his whereabouts thanks to the back-room deal that sold him off to the prison. So he wasn't abandoned, but he did feel that way and has been stewing in it for weeks or months. Seeing that exchange play out was surprisingly cathartic.

And that's about as far as I've gotten to date. I don't know if the story can stick a landing, but it's done a shockingly good job of presenting a newbie progressing to jaded would-be hero so far.