9/22/2023 0 Comments Remnant from the ashes review![]() Heed my wary words and proceed at your peril. I ended up having more fun than I expected to, but that shiny nugget of suffering remains. More than this minor unease, my playtime was marked by anger, by exasperated breaths and whitened knuckles. I just got lucky, squeaking through the cracks. I just couldn’t shake the small, nagging sense that my few successes weren’t earned. If that’s your cup of tea, perfect! Every victory will be hard-fought, bloody, and beautiful once behind you. The developers are not shy about how hard this game is. For the most part though, it’s just a steady climb. There were moments of pure, unfiltered rage, peaks of elation, ah-ha moments, and quiet zen grinds. My time with Remnant was a total roller-coaster. So many of my fights were survived by mere slivers of health, it’s absolutely worth it. On that note, spend every scrap you have on better armor and guns. You can trade it for traits, but these offer up tiny boosts for like, the first thirty ranks. You don’t even lose experience when you die! Of course, the downside is that said experience is almost worthless. Eventually, the fruits of your savage toil can be funneled into projects like better armor, stronger guns, and cool weapon mods. Even if you’re being mashed into an oily leather paste, all your loot carries over. One thing that helped offset the rising misery is the crafting system. The stage is set for your constant suffering in some truly excellent locales. Any wonder you feel is quickly replaced by bundled nerves and building frustration, but still. The enemy design, the worlds, and the lore all drip with eldritch potential. You don’t even have to suffer for that long! Every new wave of opponents are awful beasts who will snuff your out like a candle, but at least they’re also really cool. Struggling through the ruined cityscape unlocks some fabulous new worlds. There are rewards for your perseverance, to be sure. The luck you’re saddled with can be good or bad, but it’s still a major component of Remnant: From the Ashes. Things like item drops and sidequests can also work in your favor, if they end up being good ones. ![]() ![]() The sudden release of tension and stress is still cathartic, but in a subtly different way. Instead, you just sort of survived? Like crouching in the window frame of a falling building. It’s like seeing the sheet music of the universe. Killing, for example, a Dark Souls boss, you feel like a god-given flesh. In fact, there’s enough luck peppered throughout this whole game that your victories are cheapened as a result. I must have smashed my head against that fight forty times before I scraped out the other side. I only beat that boss after the perfect sequence of enemies let me survive the two minute challenge and move on. ![]() The Root Mother boss fight was an especially egregious offender on this front. A slight shift in enemy behavior that worked out in my favor one time in 20. Even then, my eventual success was more due to luck rather than skill. My own average completion time for a tough boss challenge was somewhere around the 90 minute mark. Boss battles will sorely tempt you to back out and try this all some other way. ![]()
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