Chronos: Before the Ashes (PlayStation 4) review "Souls-like sans soul"

To preface things: Chronos: Before the Ashes isn't a truly bad game, it's just extremely uninspired. One of the many games taking inspiration from FROM's Souls series, it is only too eager to tread the same path as its inspirations. On the rare occasion it does try to do something a bit different, the end result tends to be quite the mixed bag. In fact, I'd say the highest praise I can give this game is that it's pretty short and not particularly difficult, so a player can get through it before its flaws become too obnoxious.

But give Gunfire Games a bit of credit — a fair bit of imagination was put into its concept! You control an anonymous hero who is sent into the game's world in order to stop a powerful dragon. Due to the terms of this arrangement, you'll be able to recover from death over the course of a year, returning to life at the end of that span. As a young man, you'll be easily able to put points gained from leveling up into physical attributes such as strength and agility. Find yourself a few decades older and those stats will be much tougher to improve; however, it will now be a lot cheaper and more convenient to improve your arcane power.

Imaginative, yet easy to exploit. Since enemies only respawn after you die, in the early going, I followed a simple strategy where I'd slaughter the weak early-game foes every single chance I had, allowing me to gain a fair number of levels before I'd even finished the first of its scant few major areas. Fighting those enemies (and several others) was a pretty simple process. I'd hold up my shield to block their initial attack and then hit them until they were dead. Most of the time, I'd only have to worry about one baddie assaulting me at a time, so I could typically count on gaining a few levels every single life my character led and use the additional health and offensive stats those provided to get a little farther my next life. As a result, I finished Chronos before it became convenient to put a single point into my guy's arcane ability.

Part of the credit for the ease with which I finished this game must be given to a pair of deviations from FROM's formula. While, as should be expected, you'll only be able to heal yourself a handful of times per life, you'll regain all your health upon gaining a level — something which happens automatically upon gaining sufficient experience. You also don't need to worry about losing gained experience due to dying. You keep all the stuff and, therefore, never will have to worry about perishing a second time while making a mad rush to where you previously fell in order to reclaim that body's spoils.

Another reason I found this game easier than its inspirations was because everything basically is geared towards one method of play and one method only. In those FROM games, you tend to have a fair number of options for how you want to tackle the assorted challenges. Powerful, but slow, two-handed weapons; lightweight, but quick to swing or thrust, swords; bows to soften up foes from a distance; all sorts of magical spells — there are a lot of possibilities, which makes it easy for two gamers to have two very different experiences.

In Chronos, you have two options. You can start out with an axe and focus more on strength with your slower and more powerful weapon OR you can grab the sword and pump points into agility as you use a quicker weapon that might not hit quite as hard. And that's it. There are no weapons that fire any sort of projectile, so you'll spend the entire time in melee with foes. Even the handful of spells you obtain — you know, the only reason to bother with the arcane stat assuming you die enough to make it worth putting points into — operate as buffs as opposed to being actual means of offense.

This is not ideal! Even though I put over 200 hours into Elden Ring, I have a desire to play through it again. Why? Because I used a pure melee power build and, over the time I spent playing that way, found myself reading all sorts of things about just how godly a good magic build can be. Since my character was a big, dumb lummox, all those pretty spells were little more than vendor trash for me, as my stats never came remotely close to allowing me to utilize them. Chronos does not allow for any legitimate versatility in your character build, so once you've gotten though it, there's really no reason to give it another shot.

Especially since that first run-through of the game is unwilling to deliver much more than the basics. If you've played a Souls game or any of their clones, you'll know just what to expect. You'll travel through dungeons possessing occasional checkpoints and more frequent "shortcuts to before" that gradually make journeying from one checkpoint to the next a bit easier. You'll have to get used to how enemies attack and devise strategies that allow you to dispatch them with minimal damage to you. Occasionally, you'll battle bosses or get a key item allowing you access to a previously unreachable location. While you'll only obtain a tiny handful of weapons, you will be able to upgrade them a few times to put a bit more power behind your many, many swings. There are a few puzzles and bits of lore to read.

The puzzles at least are somewhat interesting. You'll gain a number of random items with some of them, such as keys, having an obvious use and others needing to be combined in order to become useful in your quest. One early-game puzzle was pretty nifty. After advancing a little ways into the medieval castle serving as the first real dungeon, you'll find yourself in a room with a large boss-looking creature. Except, as you'll soon discover, you're meant to operate a crank to open a gate to quickly escape at this point. Stick around and try to fight and the ensuing one-hit kill will show you the folly of that choice. No, what you have to do is notice how his room has a large mirror in the back with a code scrawled above it. Later on, you'll find a mirror located near a pedestal containing stone blocks that can be arranged to form that code. Do that — eventually, as you'll find that a couple blocks are missing from the pedestal — and you'll be able to walk into that mirror and pop out the one in the boss' room with the additional size necessary to hold your own in battle.

Moments like that were cool. They added something to the Souls formula and provided this game with cool moments that made exploring its world rewarding, as any room could possibly contain something I'd need to progress further. Unfortunately, those moments were the exception rather than the rule. As someone who's gotten hooked on the Souls formula, I was able to glean some degree of enjoyment from Chronos, but it was a mere fraction of the fun I've had with the real deal. I missed having the ability to truly customize my style of play and the challenge was a bit on the light side compared to what I'm used to from this sort of game. It really felt like I was playing something that was perfectly happy to be an inferior clone of its inspirations where very little about the experience stood out as memorable or even worth remembering too far down the road.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (June 16, 2023) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.