| Of Ash and Steel | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Playtest Review | Review |
Of Ash and Steel Review Overview
What is Of Ash and Steel?
Of Ash and Steel is an immersive open-world action-adventure RPG set in medieval times, following a cartographer named Tristan with the potential to shape the fate of the entire world. Players will experience the game from the perspective of this civilian, exploring their environment, forging alliances, fighting off dangerous beasts and bandits, and uncovering the island's secrets.
Of Ash and Steel features:
⚫︎ Classic RPG Style Gameplay
⚫︎ No Quest Markers
⚫︎ Various Professions to Master
⚫︎ Open World Exploration
⚫︎ Slow Burn Narrative and Progression
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Of Ash and Steel’s gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
|||||
| $24.99 |
Of Ash and Steel Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Classic RPG Beats Rewarding Progression |
Extremely Slow Burn Subpar Presentation Multiple Bugs and Performance Issues |
Of Ash and Steel Story - 7/10
Of Ash and Steel’s narrative starts extremely vague and might actually put you off early on. The struggle is getting through everything else early on before it really starts to pick up. For what it’s worth, it suffers mainly due to a lack of navigation, leading to hours of wasted time. It also doesn’t help that most of the characters and dialogue aren’t particularly likable or well-written aside from the protagonist.
Of Ash and Steel Gameplay - 6/10
The gameplay has its good and bad points, but the latter is much more noticeable. It follows the classic RPG-style design, offering the player freedom to explore and do things as they see fit. However, many of its elements, specifically the clunky combat, awkward movement, and numerous bugs, feel like they’re designed to frustrate rather than hold your interest.
Of Ash and Steel Visuals - 5/10
In terms of visuals, it’s not a good-looking game. The models, textures, terrains, and animations are reminiscent of the PS3-era RPGs, which would’ve been a hit decades ago. Everything looks dated, and you might even think that you were playing a game that was released in the 2000s, and it doesn’t help that many of the characters look alike.
Of Ash and Steel Audio - 7/10
The music, sound effects, and ambient noise are generally acceptable, but they’re not noteworthy enough. The voice acting is good, and it is the star of the show, but it has multiple issues with mixing and a specific problem where it uses pre-recorded voice lines for any character outside of cutscenes that don't match the character's voice actor.
Of Ash and Steel Value for Money - 8/10
At $24.99, the game’s open world is massive, further highlighting the value of exploration. Aside from questing, there’s a ton of side content to let you immerse yourself in the island of Greyshaft, which is mostly enjoyable. Jank aside, its main issues are the broken questlines and performance issues, which should be fixed ASAP, given that the game requires a significant investment of time in it.
Of Ash and Steel Overall - 66/100
Of Ash and Steel is an extremely slow burn, and even then, that might be putting it lightly. While it does get interesting the more you play it, it’s not a game that many will enjoy, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the zero-to-hero design of old-school RPGs. To make matters worse, the core design of the game highlights the game’s flaws and brutal nature even more, which tends to make things look even worse or more frustrating.
Of Ash and Steel Review: An Ambitious Slow Burn That's Not For Everyone
One thing about old-school RPGs is that they’re famous for not holding your hand. Games like Gothic, Risen, Elex, and even Kingdom Come: Deliverance are meant to be a journey where you start as a nobody with very few skills and become a somebody with exceptional talent, depending on where you invest your points.
One might even say that the design is quite brutal and masochistic, especially since it reiterates the fact that you’re not some chosen one, or at least not yet. Nevertheless, it’s a dying subgenre of games that’s a case of you either loving it or not.
Enter Of Ash and Steel, an indie RPG inspired by the classics, which means it won’t hold your hand and won’t guide you where to go next. Although I was initially disappointed with its initial playtest, I had to check out the full release to see if the game had improved on some of the gripes that I had. So, is it worth your time, and has it improved since the playtest? That’s what I intend to find out.
Welcome to Grayshaft
Set in the fictional world of the Kingdom of the Seven, you play as Tristan, a cartographer who was coincidentally enlisted by Astarta’s army in an expedition to Grayshaft. Since classic RPGs inspire the game, you can expect that Tristan isn’t your typical hero.
He quickly finds out that the island of Grayshaft is brutal; their expedition was attacked the very night they landed on the island, leaving him as the sole survivor. Armed with nothing, he sets out to finish the mission that the expedition was supposed to do and find a way home.
The overall narrative of Of Ash and Steel doesn’t immediately hook you in. The premise and the intro cinematic sort of set up the world, but it’s vague and, quite frankly, boring. In fact, it’ll take you more than a couple of hours to probably even make progress with the main quest, but that’s also part of the game’s design, and we’ll get to that later. The story does pick up after some time, but it’s tough to keep going with a story if the characters, dialogue, and overall writing aren’t amazing.
Tristan, as a protagonist, is the perfect candidate for a zero-to-hero journey. His whole character is perfect since he’s definitely not cut out to be the stereotypical hero, but he needs to be at least skilled enough to get through the dangers of Grayshaft to survive. So if the protagonist isn’t the issue, what is it?
It’s everyone else. None of the characters are as interesting as Tristan, which makes them forgettable as you continue through the game. Most of them are generic, as there is only a limited number of NPCs that give you context, even though there are so many of them. To that end, I was only interested in Tristan’s journey rather than the overarching storyline, which made the game’s world less appealing.
The worst part is that the game easily breaks immersion because of its lackluster presentation. Most of them also resemble each other due to the game’s PS3-era visuals. Other than that, there are audio mixing issues, jarring pre-recorded voice lines that play for any NPC that don’t match the voice actor, and wonky animations, all of which contribute to diminishing the overall experience.
It’s easy to dismiss it as an indie game and budget problem, but it’s the little things that you overlook in many other games that add up to a bad time.
No Map, No Guide
Since the game is inspired by classic RPGs, it’s to be expected that the game will not hold your hand. No quest markers, no map, and no directions. You’ll need to find hints from NPC interactions and naturally just find things on your own to progress in the many quests that you’ll be undertaking. This is where you start to see the problems of how ambitious this game gets.
The world of Of Ash and Steel is massive, and with the lack of a map, it’s very easy to get lost.
This means that the majority of your gameplay will be spent going around, only to find out that you’ve been going around in circles. This extends to Greyshard, the first hub of Grayshaft, where it’s a massive city with numerous NPCs, buildings, and more.
When it does work, the game does have a lot to explore and do. There are quests for you to start and, hopefully, accomplish, enemies for you to challenge and probably run away from until you get stronger, and mini-games for you to play and get rewards from. It’s quite a loaded game, one that promises a world of wonder and adventure. Now if only you had a damn map.
In my case, a good chunk of my playtime was spent getting lost in the city, and not the good kind of exploration where you actually find something new. The issues tend to pile on each other because each element of gameplay fundamentally affects everything else. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like open exploration; it’s more like I hate wasting time due to wandering into a zone that I’m not meant to be in.
Sure, the main idea is to explore and get lost, but it seems wrong that you can’t have an in-game map when the character you’re playing as is a cartographer.
Janky Combat Mechanics
As much as I want to say that the combat improves later on, it takes so long for this to actually happen. Let me warn you now that it’ll take a significantly long time before you even comfortably fight enemies on your level, and that’s if you’re actually getting skills to make combat easier. And even when you finally get certain skills and mastery, you’re still held hostage by the game’s animations, difficulty, and overall jankiness, to the point where the systems feel like they’re fighting against you.
An example of this is when you’re fighting a Mauler, or the equivalent of a wolf in other RPGs; they have extremely fast animations, have an affinity to dodge every swing that you do, and tend to run circles around you. In my case, it took me a good three minutes to fight a single Mauler since my swings were way too slow in comparison to its movements.
Don’t even get me started on the stamina management. Early on, you can only use up to two to three actions before you’ve spent everything. You can’t even do a hit-and-run approach since you probably won’t have enough stamina to actually dodge the enemy after attacking. And to add salt to the wound, you can suffer from injuries that will make combat encounters unplayable.
It’s hard to be invested in an ARPG when the combat isn’t satisfying, rewarding, or even fun. Every encounter is meant to be a struggle due to Tristan’s background, and I can understand that. But if it’s meant to be a struggle because enemies deal obscene amounts of damage, or your animations don’t connect for whatever reason, then it may just be that combat isn’t well-designed.
Gold Makes the World Go Round
One of the most important elements of an RPG is progression, and in this case, it’s very heavily tied to how much money you have. It features a standard leveling system where leveling up allows you to allocate attribute points, which in turn correlate with increasing your stats. Learning skills, on the other hand, is a different story.
Learning a skill requires you to talk to specific NPCs who can teach you and will also need a sum of gold. In the context of overall progression, it’s a fine system. But you have to remember that you’re flat out broke early on. You’ll need to do quests or find random things to sell so that you can earn gold to learn more skills.
The harsh part is that everything revolves around gold. To have stronger equipment, you either need to craft it or buy it with more gold. To get started in crafting, you need to level the proper stats and have the gold to learn the skills. And it goes on and on. In fact, all of the issues that I just mentioned, like combat and exploration, can be solved by having enough gold to strengthen yourself.
But is earning gold difficult? Well…
Don’t Talk About Fight Club
Aside from quests and collecting junk to sell to merchants, one of the easiest ways to actually earn gold and experience is through the in-game fight club, Ranta. It’s essentially an underground fight club where the participants compete for money. The catch? It’s actually a turn-based "card game."
The goal is to knock out your opponent by depleting their health through attacking parts of their body that they leave undefended. Attacking costs attack points, defending costs defense points, and abilities cost focus points. It may be hard to understand on paper, but essentially, it’s a glorified guessing game with a semblance of resource management.
Each round, you can choose to attack a certain part of the enemy (head, body, or legs). Likewise, you choose a part of Tristan to defend. You have different choices for your offense and defense. For offense, you can choose to attack a singular body part or even spend more resources to make your attack unblockable. On the other hand, you can choose to block strikes for that specific body part or use more resources to counter all strikes on that specific part.
Quite simple, right? Well, now Tristan’s inexperience also comes into play. In almost every fight, you’re pretty much on the losing end if you don’t get the advantage early. Enemies deal more damage than you do, and if you don’t guess right on the first round, there’s probably no chance for you to come back, especially if you don’t have the abilities to pull you through.
You’re pretty much rolling the dice on the first round every time. Until you have enough focus points to spend them on abilities that help you win the fight, that is. While there are several different abilities available, I found the ones that guaranteed me an additional turn of survival or guaranteed me a turn of damage to be the ones to be the most successful.
Regardless of how janky it all works, I’m not kidding when I say that this mini-game singlehandedly saved my interest in the game. To the point that it became the reason I got through the early game in the first place. You can technically say I "cheated" the progression by reloading the game after every loss, but given that the game wants to make you suffer at every turn, I’ll say it was a necessary evil to experience more of what the game has to offer.
Is Of Ash and Steel Worth It?
Only For Masochists and Hardcore Fans of the Classics
To answer the questions I asked earlier, Of Ash and Steel is a game that’s not for everyone, and yes, it actually improved from its initial playtest. It’s a game I’ll recommend if you’re into specific RPGs, and not if you’re a general fan of them. The slow-moving narrative, the brutal combat, the lack of quest markers, and the hard-to-earn progression systems are things that tend to be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing. It’s a game designed to be enjoyed by slowly working up your strength to overcome its many challenges.
However, its numerous flaws make it very easy to lose interest in what the game is trying to sell. To make matters worse, the intended frustration that you’re supposed to experience can be aggravated by unintended problems that you can’t control. The visuals aren’t eye-catching, the gameplay is janky (sometimes not in a good way), and multiple bugs and glitches may even be game-breaking.
The rewarding progression is there, but it’ll take a long time until it actually becomes rewarding. It's a masochistic and brutal RPG that you’ll need to give yourself a reason to like, especially if you’ve never played games like this before.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
|||||
| $24.99 |
Of Ash and Steel FAQ
Is There Character Creation in Of Ash and Steel?
No. You play as a preset character for the entirety of the game. There are options to customize his appearance, but these are mainly limited to changes in hairstyle and facial hair.
Does Of Ash and Steel Have Controller Support?
Yes. To play on a controller, you have to enable the input type as "Controller" in the settings. The developers have already mentioned that they’re working on a patch to make this setting automatic.
Game8 Reviews
You may also like...
Of Ash and Steel Product Information
 |
|
| Title | OF ASH & STEEL |
|---|---|
| Release Date | November 24, 2025 |
| Developer | Fire & Frost |
| Publisher | tinyBuild |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Action, RPG, Survival |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Of Ash and Steel Official Website |
