Ashen is about exploring and cleansing a newly radiant world, but it's often at its best in the dark. A few hours into this derivative but engrossing third-person RPG, there's a quest that takes you deep below ground in search of a corrupted giantess queen. Entering her realm is an ordeal - the nearby hills are alive with other giants who are fond of leaping on your head, to say nothing of coyote-type predators that breath fire - but the catacombs themselves are something else.
The surface world's packs of club-wielding vagrants give way, here, to more treacherous breeds of foe. Skeletons who lunge from their dust as you pass (in a masterful bit of risk-reward design, you can shatter them with one blow if you catch them mid-resurrection), and wraiths who evaporate on contact only to pounce from the blackness. Wall-crawlers with peeled-open chests who lurk below ledges, popping up behind you with an easily-missed slither of flesh. All these violent delights plus yet more giants, silhouetted near corridor mouths or looming in the stark but short-ranged glare of your lantern - unhelpfully, given the perils of dodging with deadfalls to either side, you can't hold the latter and a shield at the same time. It took me a couple hours to bumble through that wondrous nightmare to the cavern at the area's base, where the abundance of space felt positively decadent. It's probably the finest dungeon environment I've set foot in this year.
For all that, Ashen is also often at its best in the light. There's another area later on that is much less clever but similarly oppressive, not least for its population of spear-chucking cultists. Survive it and you're treated to a glorious vista of a fallen city, inspired (to my untrained eye) by Mughal architecture - bronze domes catching the daybreak above pastel pink cobbles and demolished houses. The nature and timing of this spectacle immediately recall Anor Londo, the heavenly city of Dark Souls, much as the queen's realm feels like a mishmash of the latter's Catacombs and Tomb of the Giants. Ashen owes an awful lot to From Software's work - to pick out the most obvious mechanical debts, all your XP is dropped in a puddle on death, and landscapes are woven around runestones where you can meditate cross-legged to refill your healing gourd, at the price of reviving all the enemies you've slain. It's essentially a cleaned-up cover version, though its art direction and scanty multiplayer elements have more in common with Journey. But if it never really surprises, and lacks the scale and elusiveness of its inspirations, Ashen is elegant and demanding enough to stand on its own feet.
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