Info about Back To Ashes:

Official game description:
Experiment
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Game is an experiment of connecting several old-school game classics - delivered by one person team.  
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Worlds Are Being Consumed By Unknown Force.
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Explore dead realms to find the way to save Your own.  
Join the journey through dark, corrupted worlds and experience epic enemy encounters._  
Key Features:
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**Grab the Weapon**\- learn skill based combat and work out own style.  
**Face the Fate**\- fight Your way through corrupted realms, experience Your world's future and face the power of Primordial.  
**Find Your Own Way** - choose between different statistics, traits and randomly generated items to build unique gameplay which fits you. Discover a plethora of different bonuses, runes and other components, gaining unlimited spoils.  
**\*Game has controller support but was initially designed to play with keyboard+mouse**

Release date: 20 Feb, 2023

Categories: Soulslike Combat, Action RPG, Exploration, Character Progression, Real-time Combat, Single-player Story


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Engaging Gameplay & Value (weight 0.99): Players find the core gameplay loop highly enjoyable, addictive, and rewarding, offering significant content for its low price. The game provides a balanced challenge without excessive frustration, featuring solid combat, good level design, and a satisfying loot system.
- Strong Souls-like Inspiration (weight 0.62): The game successfully captures the essence of classic Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, delivering a dark, challenging, and nostalgic experience. It blends this with Diablo-style looting, creating a unique and well-executed take on the genre.
- Responsive Solo Developer (weight 0.41): Players are highly impressed by the game's quality and scope, especially considering it's a one-person project. The developer is praised for being very responsive, quickly addressing issues, and consistently updating and improving the game.
- Well-Designed Bosses & Enemies (weight 0.3): The game features a great variety of tough but fair bosses and enemies with interesting mechanics. Boss fights are challenging, rewarding, and often repeatable, contributing to the game's overall difficulty balance.
- Expansive World & Exploration (weight 0.28): The game's world opens up significantly after initial areas, offering large, varied zones with different enemy types and rewarding exploration. The level design is praised for being well-thought-out, consistent, and full of hidden treasures.
- Decent Story & Lore (weight 0.12): The game's story and lore are considered good or at least adequate, providing context and enhancing the overall experience. Players appreciate the presence of a plot, dialogues, and an engaging narrative.
- Atmospheric & Visually Appealing (weight 0.11): The game boasts a solid atmosphere, good graphics that fit its dark fantasy style, and an immersive aesthetic. The environments, music, and overall look contribute positively to the player experience.

Common complaints:
- Clunky and Unresponsive Combat (weight 0.59): Players consistently report that the combat system feels clunky, unresponsive, and lacks depth. Issues include poor hit detection, repetitive animations, input lag, and a general lack of satisfaction, making it a major deterrent for a Souls-like game.
- Poor Controls and Movement (weight 0.41): The game suffers from unintuitive and unresponsive controls, including awkward default keybindings, limited dodge directions, and character movement issues like getting stuck on terrain. This significantly impacts the overall gameplay experience.
- Camera Issues (weight 0.29): The camera system is problematic, with issues like clipping through walls, jitteriness when locked on, and awkward movements during animations, negatively impacting combat and navigation.
- Excessive Darkness and Monotonous Graphics (weight 0.26): Many players find the game excessively dark, even with brightness settings maximized, making it difficult to see. Combined with muddy textures and monotonous color palettes, the visual experience is often unappealing and strains the eyes.
- Confusing Level Design and Navigation (weight 0.26): The level design, particularly in early dungeons, is frequently described as confusing and maze-like, with repetitive environments. This leads to players getting lost, revisiting areas, and struggling to find the correct progression path due to a lack of clear direction.
- Unpolished and Buggy Experience (weight 0.23): Players feel the game is unfinished and unpolished, citing numerous bugs, glitches, and performance issues. This gives the impression that the game was released prematurely, despite leaving early access, and may have been abandoned by developers.
- Unbalanced Difficulty and Enemy Design (weight 0.14): Players find certain enemies and bosses unfairly difficult, with one-shot mechanics and disproportionate reach. This, combined with issues like enemies not falling and players being unable to parry while enemies can, creates an unbalanced challenge.
- Unsatisfying Souls-like Comparison (weight 0.12): While inspired by Dark Souls, the game fails to deliver a comparable experience, particularly in combat and level design. Players note a lack of originality, depth, and polish compared to established Soulsborne titles.
- Frustrating Inventory and Loot System (weight 0.12): The inventory system is inconvenient, lacking basic features like discarding or selling unwanted items. The random stat loot system is unrewarding and necessitates grinding, while experience gain is too low, hindering progression.
- Lack of Customization and Tutorials (weight 0.11): The game lacks character customization options, such as gender selection. Additionally, there's an absence of proper tutorials for combat mechanics and general gameplay, leaving players to figure things out on their own.
- Inconsistent Audio and Missing Voice-overs (weight 0.09): There are frequent reports of inconsistent NPC voice volumes, missing dialogue audio, and a general lack of sound for certain interactions and objects, which detracts from immersion.
- Weapon Availability and Balance (weight 0.05): Players report difficulty finding specific weapon types, like greatswords, even after many hours, limiting build diversity. Some also found early powerful drops made other weapons useless.
- Repetitive Mini-games and Key Collection (weight 0.05): The lock-picking mini-game is described as useless and repetitive, always being the same and easily passed. Collecting multiple keys in the same map also contributes to a sense of monotony.

Gameplay feedback:
- Challenging Combat & Difficulty (weight 0.33): The game is noted for its difficulty, requiring patience and strategic combat. Players must manage stamina, dodge, block, and learn enemy attack patterns, as mistakes often lead to death. While challenging, some reviewers found it slightly easier than traditional Dark Souls games.
- Souls-like with Diablo Loot (weight 0.28): The game is consistently described as a Dark Souls-inspired experience, featuring challenging third-person combat with stamina management and a dark medieval setting. It differentiates itself by incorporating a Diablo-style loot system with random stats, affixes, and sockets on gear, making it a 'looter slasher' or 'hack-and-slash RPG' hybrid.
- Extensive Progression Systems (weight 0.2): Players progress through a combination of gear acquisition, character leveling, and a large, sphere grid-like talent/skill tree. This system allows for attribute bonuses and passive perks, encouraging grinding for both better equipment and skill points.
- Control & Input Options (weight 0.1): The game offers remappable controls and supports both mouse/keyboard and joysticks. However, some users reported issues with default joystick layouts when using Steam Input, suggesting it might require adjustments for optimal play.
- Quality of Life Suggestions (weight 0.09): Players have suggested several quality-of-life improvements, including adding a jump mechanic, refining stamina costs, and potentially expanding the world beyond caverns to include open areas and towns. Character customization is also a desired feature.
- Gear & Blacksmith System (weight 0.06): Equipment can be upgraded using materials at a blacksmith, who is located in the central hub. Loot quality is not always tied to chest difficulty, and some chests require lock-picking.
- No In-Game Map (weight 0.04): A significant point of feedback is the absence of an in-game map, which makes navigation challenging for players.
- Dodge Mechanics (weight 0.04): The game features two types of dodges: a short dodge with invincibility frames and a longer directional dodge, crucial for combat engagement.
- Katos Boss Fight (weight 0.03): The Katos boss fight is a two-phase encounter, with the first phase being manageable but time-consuming.

Performance notes:
- Minor technical issues (weight 0.09): Players reported encountering a few crashes and inventory bugs, though generally not severe. Some also noted minor visual glitches like looking through textures. These issues are somewhat expected given the game's Early Access status.
- Critical gameplay bugs (weight 0.05): Significant bugs include getting stuck in objects, leading to fall damage, and severe lag during boss effects and cinematics that can result in instant death. These issues severely impact gameplay, even on lower graphics settings.
- Performance stutters (weight 0.03): Specific areas, particularly spiral staircases, cause noticeable stutters in performance. This indicates a potential optimization issue in certain environmental assets.
- Good Steam Deck performance (weight 0.03): The game reportedly runs well on the Steam Deck, indicating good optimization for portable play. This is a positive point for players who prefer handheld gaming.

Recommendations:
- Potential for Future Improvement (weight 0.55): Many players see significant potential in the game, expressing hope for future updates, bug fixes, and polish. They are looking forward to the full release and believe the game could achieve a much higher rating with further development.
- High Frustration, Requires Patience (weight 0.49): The game can be frustrating and requires significant patience, particularly for learning combat and navigating menus. It is not recommended for players with low frustration tolerance.
- Mixed Recommendations (weight 0.47): Overall recommendations are mixed, with some advising against it in its current state, while others suggest giving it a chance. Many are waiting to see how it evolves during early access.
- Recommended for Soulslike Fans (weight 0.24): The game is highly recommended for fans of the Dark Souls series and other challenging action RPGs. Players appreciate its 'Old-School-Experience' and 'Souls-like vibes,' especially considering it's from a small development team.
- Desire for More Content (weight 0.14): Players are eager for more content, updates, and new features. They express excitement for future explorations and hope for additions like a New Game+ option.
- Soundtrack and Minor Suggestions (weight 0.03): A minor point suggests the soundtrack is good enough to be bought separately. Another minor suggestion is for equipable torches or an oil lamp.

Other player notes:
- Engaging despite rough edges (weight 0.21): Despite some issues like crashes, controller remapping problems, or general 'jank', many players found the game intriguing and spent significant time playing, exploring, and finishing available content. This suggests a compelling core experience.
- Game is still in Early Access (weight 0.14): Despite not always being explicitly tagged, multiple players note the game's version numbers (e.g., 0.9, 0.9.6) and state that it feels like or is still in early access or beta, indicating ongoing development.
- Inconsistent controller support (weight 0.08): Players reported initial issues with controller support, including remapping difficulties and lack of key binding. While some found workarounds via Steam settings or noted partial support being added, it remains an area of concern.
- Concerns about update frequency (weight 0.04): One player expressed concern that the game might be 'dead' regarding updates, suggesting a desire for more consistent development. This is coupled with a suggestion for an equipment upgrade system over random loot.
- Limited early game progression (weight 0.04): Some players noted being stuck with the first sword or still navigating the initial dungeon, indicating a potentially slow or challenging early game progression.
- Developer uses asset libraries (weight 0.02): The developer openly admitted to using assets from various libraries. While not necessarily a negative, it's a point of transparency that players might consider.

Emotions:
- Satisfaction (weight 0.23): Players are highly satisfied with the game's combat, finding it rewarding, fluid, and challenging, often comparing it favorably to Dark Souls. The immersive atmosphere, extensive exploration, varied enemies, and the unique 'Hell/Realm of the Dead' system also contribute significantly to player enjoyment and a sense of value for money, especially given its early access status and price point.
- Frustration (weight 0.16): Frustration primarily stems from clunky and unresponsive combat mechanics, including hitbox issues, poor hit detection, and high stamina costs. Players also experience significant frustration with confusing level design, lack of a map, camera issues, and numerous bugs, which collectively hinder smooth gameplay and navigation.
- Disappointment (weight 0.15): Disappointment arises from the game's perceived unfinished state, clunky controls, and unclear direction, leading to an unrewarding experience. Players are also let down by poor level design, lack of updates, and an unsatisfying combat system, which detract from the game's potential.
- Excitement (weight 0.12): Players express excitement for the game's potential, often comparing it to the original Dark Souls and praising its challenging bosses and immersive atmosphere. There is strong anticipation for future content updates, new game+ options, and the full release, indicating a positive outlook on the game's development.
- Appreciation (weight 0.11): Players highly appreciate the developer's responsiveness, quick bug fixes, and continuous improvements, especially given that it's often a one-person project. The game's endearing indie vibe, challenging lore, and well-designed systems also garner significant praise.
- Hope (weight 0.08): Hope is centered on the game's future potential, with players looking forward to significant improvements, bug fixes, and new content during early access. There is a strong desire for features like character customization, additional translations, and overall polish to elevate the game to a very good Action-RPG.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.07): Players enjoy the game's dark and brooding atmosphere, creative boss rooms, and souls-like combat. The challenging difficulty, varied enemy types, and rewarding exploration also contribute to an overall positive and engaging gameplay experience.
- Confusion (weight 0.04): Confusion arises from the game's unfinished feel, unclear progression paths, and complex maps that make players feel lost. Issues with unintuitive controls and an unclear leveling system further contribute to a sense of disorientation.
- Surprise (weight 0.02): Players are surprised by the game's unexpected depth, such as discovering a huge world after the first boss, its immersive qualities, and its ability to load into triple-screen resolutions automatically.
- Anger (weight 0.02): Anger is primarily caused by game-breaking bugs and a perceived poor combat system, leading players to describe the game as }