Sure, it’s great when a huge game (Starfield, for example) meets expectations. That’s lovely. But what really fires me up as a reviewer is when an innocuous indie game turns out to be a barnstormer. I’ll look at the £9.99 price tag, timebox a couple of hours, prepare to be underwhelmed, only for it to blow my socks into next week. Without a doubt, this is what game reviewing is about.
We’re still looking for our socks. Ashina: The Red Witch is the first Xbox game from Stranga Games, who have been pumping out titles, mostly horror-themed, onto itch.io and Steam. It’s a narrative adventure that has a bit of Earthbound here, some To The Moon there, and plenty of Undertale throughout. And while it doesn’t meet their collective quality bars, it takes a leap and only misses by a few inches.
Things kick off with Ashina, or ‘Ash’ to her friends, who is chatting away to her sister, Tena, in her apartment. Ash is the sensible one, Tena is the flirty, not-so-sensible one. Suddenly, a chap who looks remarkably like Vivi from Final Fantasy IX breaks into the flat and steals Ash’s pendant. This pendant was a gift to Ash from Tena’s mother, who passed a few years ago, so Ash is rightly miffed. She heads off after him, which takes her through a portal and – gasp – into the afterlife.
It turns out that the afterlife looks a lot like a Studio Ghibli movie. There are spirits, demons, ghosts and vampires of various sizes and degrees of grotesqueness. But somehow – and this is where Ghibli comes in – they still look adorable. I want to pop into Build-a-Bear and purchase a life-size plushie of every last one of them.
Ash only has a day to get the pendant back, because the path home to Shiruta is disappearing. So, she chases after little Tanto (his name isn’t really Vivi), completing quests for cryptids so that the way forward can open up enough so that she can grab him.
Of course, we wouldn’t be handing out the big scores if it was just a goose chase. Other threads of narrative start appearing. Is her mum, Roh, in the afterlife? Why does everyone seem to know her mum? Why are some people particularly interested in Ash? And where is Tena during all of this? You can be sure that these twist round like a helix by the end of the story.
Ashina: The Red Witch is far from a complicated game. There’s no combat, no real puzzles, no exploration even. It’s broken down into sections – mostly towns and buildings – where you spend your time looking for people to talk to, exhausting their dialogue options. There’s some bump-and-grinding of the environment, too, as you tap on every interesting spot on the screen to see if there’s an item that you could use.
It’s not too far from a graphic adventure. The items can be picked up and used on the people who want them. Someone might want a pack of cigarettes or some water for soup. By helping people, you get stuff to help others, and so the chain of fetch quests continues. Eventually, the obstruction is removed and you can get to the next town or building.
We will hold our hands up and say it doesn’t get any better than that. If you scoff at walking simulators or desire complicated systems from your games then you’re going to hate Ashina: The Red Witch. It’s the one and only hurdle to enjoying it. You need to accept that dialogue and simple questing is all you’re getting.
But if you’re still interested, then boy do we have a game for you. Because Ashina: The Red Witch is a lo-fi Labyrinth, a pixelated Spirited Away. Like those movies, the key to its success is its cast. We feel a huge amount of affection for its characters, and they all have very simple but effective quirks that make them memorable. We’re not going to forget a long-legged ghost mourning her daughter in the residential district, or the grocery store owner who just wants someone to love her rows upon rows of teeth.
The writing is excellent and the plotting superb. This is effectively an odyssey through a monstrous world, but there are themes of forgiveness and responsibility that run in parallel. Depending on the ending you receive, you will either be staring in shock or letting a tear roll down your face. We’re still reeling from ours. Clearly, Ashina: The Red Witch 2 needs to be greenlit as soon as possible.
There are moments where Stranga Games seem to be making it up as they go along, as small characters suddenly become incredibly important, more or less because the development team liked them. But we were on board with the plot undulations. It was always heading somewhere interesting, even if it was occasionally unearned.
There is so little risk involved in picking up Ashina: The Red Witch. It’s £9.99 for four-or-so hours of the absolute cream of narrative adventures. Only an appearance on Game Pass would have made it more of a no-brainer. If there is a risk, then it’s a miniscule one: there’s not much gameplay. You’re going to be fetch-quests and talking – a lot.
But we’re still riding that feeling – the feeling of having zero expectations, only for Ashina: The Red Witch to grab hold of our attention for hours. Ah, if only more games surprised us like this.
