Return to Ash Review (PC)

Beyond the shutters of a luminous white room, a fog emits the powerful aura of a perplexing purgatory—an empty void of an afterlife that fosters little more than a vague sense of wonder and a beckoning desire to test its inhabitants’ abilities to navigate the trials that idle between life and death. Alone, if only for a moment, the twenty-something year old awakens to emptiness—a disoriented state that applies no internal pain or suffering, but a burden, a fear of the unknown and what could potentially lie ahead on the other side of the gloomy veil. Here, in the liminal realm of Death’s doorway, Return to Ash musters up the courage to spin a yarn and conceive its tale of life, death, and above all, acceptance.

Return to Ash, for those who’ve yet to embark on their own journey, is a short colorless visual novel about a series of characters and their collective struggles to find purpose in the aftermath of their deaths. Locked in the in-between, each character has their own story to share—a glimmer of the past that, under the cloak of a new and somewhat daunting reality, has no real meaning or impact on the future. Alas, being a visual novel with a tremendous amount of dialogue and options, the decisions you make throughout the quest for purpose have a weighty butterfly effect. Who will stare Death in the eyes, and who will stumble at the first hurdle when presented with something as fickle as a game of chance, or a mere flip of a coin? In Return to Ash, it’s you who decides the fate of those stuck in purgatory.

What Lies Beyond

Return to Ash paints a simple yet somewhat though-provoking portrait, one of loss, grievance, and the perpetual fear of the unknown. It begins with a choice—a penultimate question that has the potential to transition into a rabbit hole of luck-based trials, brief but meaningful encounters, and a looping pattern of purgatory-like relationships. Do you stay in your hospital bed and wait for the nurse to come knocking, or do you accept the peculiar nature of the situation and leave the comfort of the sheets to venture out into the fog? Provided that you choose the latter of course, you are then given the opportunity to connect with characters who, like you, bathe in lonesome tides, after which you have one simple yet taxing goal to address: confront Death, and embark on a series of tasks that could potentially define your future among the living and the dead.

The game plays out like a traditional visual novel, with dialogue, choices, and the occasional puzzle paving the way toward an eventual climax. To progress, you must hawk over a band of characters, all of whom have their own personalities and ways of thinking, and compete in a minimal set of puzzles for a “chance” of returning to the world. Yet these puzzles, as simple and as universally accessible as they may seem, don’t stack the odds in your favor. Although not impossible, Death makes it so that the chances of winning are slim to non-existent. But there’s hope, and with each flip of the coin or a card, the luminous light does, thankfully, become clearer, thus presenting you with a choice that could potentially change your destiny. It’s your job, in short, to decide whether or not to actively pursue it.

Stuck in the Middle With You

As I said before, Return to Ash is just as much of a choice-based game as it is a puzzle game with loose interactive mechanics. As such, the game doesn’t stick to the rules of a traditional text-heavy novel, but instead focuses on frequent mini-games and puzzles. For example, during one encounter with Death, you have the monumental task of identifying and matching cards in a deck. A simple schoolyard game, for sure. Yet, in Return to Ash, the trials aren’t quite as forgiving or as fair; in fact, the game makes it so that your odds of outsmarting Death are less likely than succumbing to the same fate as your peers. Even still, with each page that you turn, another story beat unfolds, thus allowing you the opportunity to forge a unique narrative that can ultimately lead to one of several distinct endings.

In addition to the signature tropes of a typical visual novel, Return to Ash also features a surprisingly good score, with each panel having its own ambient theme and array of charming yet ominous sound effects and off-beat transitions. Combined with a limited yet engaging visual representation of a rather harrowing setting, Return to Ash truly does bring about a unique experience that will leave you feeling both intrigued and awfully close to the serendipitous journey that sprouts from beneath Death’s looming shadow. Does it manage to get everything right? No. But it does, however, deliver a sturdy three-hour experience that will no doubt appeal to anyone with a keen interest in the subject matter.

Verdict

Return to Ash delivers a short but compelling message about life, death, and the lengths one would travel to find purpose and acceptance. It is, to some extent, a conveyor of mixed emotions, if anything—a pamphlet of purgatory-like episodes that gives you a good look into the inner turmoil of several characters’ post-death tales. It’s a little dark at times, though it does make an effort to provide a strikingly impactful moral perspective on what looms beyond the realm of mortality. What’s more, it generates some palpable dialogue with a lot of interesting themes and ideas. And the “heroes” of this tale, while not memorable by any stretch, convey their true colors in a way that feels both personal and believable. That counts for a lot.

To cut to the chase, if you happen to have a few hours to spare, and are interested in slipping into the index of a hand-drawn visual novel that touts a significant impact on your perception of reality and the afterlife, then it’s highly likely that you’ll enjoy sifting through the panels in Serenity Forge‘s Return to Ash.