Ashen Crown review: a brutal, beautiful act of restraint
It would have been easy to make this bigger. Instead Ashfall made it sharper, and the result is the most confident action RPG of the year.
Pedro Lopes24 July 202611 min readPS5
9.2Verdict
- Developer
- Ashfall Interactive
- Publisher
- Ashfall Interactive
- Released
- 18 July 2026
- Genre
- Action RPG
- Platform
- PS5
- Playtime
- 38 hours
There is a moment about six hours into Ashen Crown where the map stops expanding. Most games in this genre would treat that as a failure of ambition. Ashen Crown treats it as the point.
Combat is deliberate without being punishing for its own sake. Every enemy in the game can be beaten with the starting weapon, and the game quietly knows it.
The performance story is unusually clean: a locked sixty in performance mode with no measurable dips across twenty hours, and a forty-fps balanced mode that is genuinely the best way to play.
Pros
- Combat that rewards patience over reflexes
- Exceptional art direction and lighting
- Locked performance across all modes
Cons
- Sparse late-game map variety
- Menu UI buries key information
Ratings breakdown
- Graphics9.5
- Gameplay9.4
- Story8.6
- Audio9.1
- Performance9.6
- Replay value8.2
Action RPGAshfall Interactive
