A couple of years ago, Darksiders developers Gunfire Games released Remnant: From The Ashes. It’s a third-person apocalyptic shooter that’s a little bit Dark Souls-y and a little bit roguelite-y, and it’s pretty good. It’s not the sort of thing I expected to get any sort of follow-up, mind you, but lo and behold, Gunfire are launching a prequel today. Named Chronos: Before The Ashes, it’s dumping guns for swords and dropping players into a labyrinth for some good old RPG action.
Unlike its predecessor, Chronos is just a singleplayer adventure, and doesn’t have online co-op. What it does have, is loads of traditional RPG things. The story is revolves around you, a hero on a lifelong quest to save your home from evil and and all that – you know the drill. Its weapon system is all Soulslike-y, too, in that you have to match up what you’re using to the skill it scales with (so some swords work better with Strenth, others with agility, etc.)
The most interesting part of the game, however, is the roguelite-ish system. Each time you die in this great big labrinth, your character must wait a year before they can return. So each new run of the maze you’re a little bit older. It’s not entirely clear what effect this has, but it does seem to have one, since the Steam page says: “When you start your journey, it’s still easy to get stronger and quicker, but the older you get, the more important your wisdom about the arcane powers will become.”
I do enjoy a bit of roguelike goodness, though, and I admire when games try to make death a bit more interesting. So yeah, I’ll probably give this one a go.
If you fancy playing Chronos: Before The Ashes yourself, it arrives on Steam around 6pm GMT (10am PT) today.
Update: I wrongly thought this game was a new prequel, turns out it’s not! Chronos is an old VR-exclusive Gunfire game, which has been overhauled now to work on all platforms without one of those funky headsets. Ta to former RPS’er Dominic Tarason for pointing this out.