In my experience, if you’re into horror at all, there are a couple of things that can and will scare you regardless of their presentation. It might be a monster, a situation, or a scenario, but whatever it is, it slips by your defenses to hit you where you live. I know somebody who could watch six slasher movies in a row without her heart rate changing, but anything with zombies gets her to dive behind the couch.
Among Ashes hit me like that, in a couple of weak spots I didn’t know I had. It plays on that sense of heightened paranoia that you can take with you into the real world after you close the book or turn off the movie. Now your imagination’s running the show, and every strange sound or misshapen shadow feels like a threat. In Among Ashes, those sounds and shadows actually are out to get you.
The game opens in 2001, a couple of weeks before Christmas. You’re an unnamed, unseen British person who’s staying in for the night to play computer games, instead of going out in the rain to hit the pubs.
At your buddy’s request, since he’s playing it, you download a freeware first-person shooter called Night Call. It puts you in the role of Jack King, a small-town British cop who responds to a disturbance at a country manor and ends up at ground zero of a zombie outbreak. Night Call is buggy, but playable, and has a fan community that’s figured out most of its puzzles despite a lack of in-game hints.
As you make progress through Night Call, it begins to glitch in ways that can’t be explained by simple programming errors. Then strange things begin to happen in your apartment around you, and the line between Night Call and reality begins to blur.
There’s a lot more I want to talk about here, but you’re best served going into Among Ashes as cold as you can. The short version is that it’s a game within a game, where you play as someone who’s playing a shooter that might have more of its creator in it than that creator intended.
Night Call is a deliberate survival horror throwback, where every individual element of it is a self-conscious reference to something else. It feels like exactly the sort of thing that an early-2000s fan programmer would think was clever, in those halcyon days before we were all too ironic to function.
To get through Night Call, you occasionally have to tab out of the application to collaborate with your buddy via instant messenger, or get up from your PC to explore your character’s apartment. It’s a clever gimmick, which serves up a few tense moments and a couple of cheap jump scares. If that was all Among Ashes was, it’d be fun but forgettable.
When you hit the second half of the game, it disengages its parking brake. At that point, all bets are off; Among Ashes begins to move freely between subgenres of horror in ways that make it impossible to predict.
There’s a real sense of impermanence to Among Ashes, for want of a better term, that drives much of its horror. It takes a positive glee in changing things while your back is turned, from subtle elements of your apartment to entire corridors within Night Call.
One of the most underutilized capabilities of video game horror is its ability to manipulate its environments for effect, but Among Ashes takes every chance it gets to do so. It opens as a blatant but well-executed appeal to nostalgia, but eventually breaks away from that to end on a high note.
I’m glad I stuck through it. I almost didn’t. On Normal difficulty, Night Call is a callback to the resource starvation of early horror like the original Resident Evil. Enemies hit like freight trains, bullets are scarce, and medical supplies are few and far between. You’re encouraged to not fight at all if you can avoid it, but you’re also frequently trapped in narrow hallways and close quarters. I eventually ran out of resources and had to restart from the beginning.
If you’re just in this for the experience, don’t feel bad about playing on Easy difficulty. Normal is designed for the sort of survival horror fan who likes knife-only runs in Resident Evil games, as you end up beating a lot of zombies into pudding with a police baton. Easy is closer to the modern model of survival horror, cf. Hollowbody or Crow Country, where resource conservation is an issue but not your primary concern.
I’d also note that Among Ashes delves into some pretty dark territory by its ending. Without any significant spoilers, much of its story deals with themes of abusive behavior. If that’s something that can ruin your day, this is not the game for you. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just a warning.
I didn’t know what to expect from Among Ashes before I started it, but it turned out to be a uniquely intense experience. I’m already forcing people to play it so I can get them into my spoiler chat. If you’re looking for something short and technically Christmasy to play in the next couple of weeks, check it out.
[Among Ashes, developed and published by Rat Cliff Games, is now available on PlayStation 5 and Steam for $14.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a PR representative for Rat Cliff Games.]
