Idols of Ash: Plunging into the Abyss

A dive into an eerie, liminal world and the nameless genre it belongs to.

There is a specific genre of 3D platformer that takes players to much darker, more dangerous locales than the Mushroom Kingdom. They remind me of those brilliant sections in Half-Life 2 where it feels like you’re breaking out of the map, only to spot a barnacle hanging just ahead and realize the entire thing was a beautifully curated set piece. I first discovered this subgenre through Lorn’s Lure, and reading developer interviews eventually led me to NaissanceE. Then White Knuckle came out (which I still haven’t played), and it hit me: there’s a whole world of these atmospheric games out there, even if I don’t quite know what to call them.

Idols of Ash fits this description perfectly, and in a fantastic way. In fact, it introduces a mechanic to the genre that I haven’t seen executed meaningfully before. Move over, Breath of the Wild glider—here, we’ve got a hook and a rope that allow us to descend cliffs in a deeply unnerving manner.

The premise is simple: you must make your way to the bottom of a cave in hopes of... finding someone (go play the game if you want to know more, it’s only $3). Periodically during your descent, you’ll come across urns that “breathe life” into you, serving as checkpoints for when you inevitably plummet toward your demise. If you fall and survive, hooray! A portion of your health bar will deplete, but you can refill the meter by collecting wisps of life floating above the corpses of previous climbers. It’s not a gory game; the bodies are artfully depicted as humanoid shapes wrapped in some kind of cloth. Hmm, I wonder what that’s about…

We aren’t the only living things in this cave, however. You’ll only catch glimpses of it from time to time, but when you do, you’d better descend faster than you ever have before. I won’t spoil the mystery in writing, but you might catch a few hints of it in my successful Nightmare Mode run linked below. (Spoiler: Nightmare Mode requires you to beat the entire game in a single life—and you may or may not unlock more maps upon completion, but who’s to say?)

The longer you play, the more tech reveals itself—creative ways to interact with the game mechanics that open up entirely new options for climbing. I even invented a move myself, which I call ‘The Crazy Man.’ It’s when you cut your rope and, instead of landing safely on a surface, you hook onto something nearby mid-air to keep descending. It’s incredibly useful for those moments when your partner is watching you play and you want them to tense up and gasp.