Greetings from the Shackled Canyon
I’ve been playing Remnant: From the Ashes off and on for the past week or two, and it’s a joyfully low-stakes third-person shooter with just a splash of Dark Souls thrown in somewhere along the way. I’ll write about it as a complete experience when I’m, y’know, done with it, but something happened last night that rivaled the highest highs of a proper Souls title or this year’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and it was the moment where Remnant really clicked for me as its own, distinct game. It’s a story of radiation-throwing warlocks, horrible dogs, and a gleeful sprint to the finish.
In Remnant, you play as some sort of post-apocalyptic survivor where a horrible glowing plant-nightmare called the Root showed up and settled in to Earth. It’s all very boilerplate post-apocalyptia on its surface, with blown-out auto shops and plenty of rusted cars to spare, but the bizarre Root are definitely the showpiece in the first of several worlds you travel through. After the first few bosses you meet, pulled semi-randomly from a hat alongside most of the levels and dungeons, you’re shown that there are worlds beyond Earth to venture to. Spurred on by the idea of maybe fixing things back home and putting an end to this whole Root business once and for all, you trudge on to the Black Sun-baked Mad Max wasteland of Rhom. (I’m pretty sure there’s one more world beyond Rhom, but I haven’t gotten there yet!)
Souls games and the genre they’ve created trade in apocalypse aesthetics almost universally: whether it’s the byzantine corporate hellhole of The Surge or the Nordic-inspired fallen gods of Lords of the Fallen, games in the Souls mold are bleak affairs punctuated by the occasional glimpse of hope or retribution. These games also tend to be very slow and methodical, apart from the more recent Bloodborne and Sekiro: get in, hit the big monster two or three times, roll back out, repeat until they’re dead and you’re 100 <Currency> richer.
In that respect, Remnant manages to get away from both of these tropes - can we call them tropes yet? - by hosting both extremely fast-paced combat scenarios and hordes upon hordes of [cultists/abomination-tree-things/dogs/dogs/so many demon dogs]. That difference came into stark relief for me last night as I scoured the wastes of Rhom and, after traveling through…some sort of alien spaceship temple where flying skulls shot black ichor at me for ten minutes, I came to the Shackled Canyon.
Before my canyon trial began, I’d been fighting foes in almost exclusively large, open areas: burned-out adobe villages, or the streets of a hollow metropolis, with an occasional brief sewer or subway thrown in for good measure. But here, in the Shackled Canyon, I found myself staring down a long, winding gauntlet of snipers, machine gunners and a legion of bloodthirsty, all-too-keen hounds. There was plenty of cover to be found within these huts, carefully carved along the earthen walls of this hellscape, but there were always more cultists, more fanatical members of the Buri tribe stampeding forward to cut me down.
I was initially thrown off by the immediacy of this place. Every other location I’d been to in my nine hours of travel gave me moments of respite in between batches of horror, but the denizens of the Shackled Canyon offered no reprieve, no easy way out save death or a leap into the black depths of the canyon. They demanded efficiency, a ruthless push forward through swaths of their kin, punctuated only by the seconds you have to reload before another volley of lasers and baying howls knocks you down.
It’s easy to get into zen states with games of this style, where the worlds are relatively static and it comes down to memorizing where an enemy spawns, what their attack patterns are, and - ultimately - the most efficient path forward. Remnant’s spaces are large enough and the map is good at letting you know when you’re retreading ground, but the flow of the combat is really where things shine. Enemies are fast, and they won’t hesitate to run up on your cover and greet you with a gun or tusk to the face. Packed in to such a thin combat hallway like this, it’s a wonderfully efficient trial by fire as you push just a little bit further than your last death, only to realize there’s another batch of enemies, that this canyon goes on far further than you thought it could.
Death came for me, time and time again, as I was internalizing the canyon’s twists and hidey-holes. A stray bullet from a sniper I hadn’t expected pushed me out of cover and into the mouth of a hound. A violent skewering by the gargantuan berserker hiding away in the wings halfway through this crucible led me to exclaim, out loud, “How was I supposed to see that coming?” An exhausting death mid-sprint to a shaman wielding potent radiation powers capable of whittling away my last bit of strength. All of these and more usher in a comically on-the-nose Nietzsche quote splayed above familiar, bold red, “YOU ARE DEAD” text.
After what felt like close to fifteen attempts, I finally reached the other side in a madcap murderous dash that felt almost too clean. Dash to this building, shoot the dog and one gunner, reload. Run past the next building, turn around when you’re in the safe spot, take out the two gunners that are harassing you. Watch out for the berserker, and smoke the shaman at the end. Breathe.
There were plenty of expletives and frantic “oh boy, oh boy, uh oh”s scattered in between that very calm, collected recounting of my path through the Shackled Canyon, but as an experience, a place, a moment in time, the canyon served as the cleanest expression of Remnant’s combat I’ve seen yet. When it works, it’s fast, brutal, and so very chunky.
I went on through the fog gates - again, this is very much One of Those Games - to fight an upside-down triangle with a ribcage that spat flames at me. It didn’t last long, and the sense of victory from that couldn’t come close to the exaltation I felt having conquered the Canyon behind me.
Hopefully, this isn’t the last surprise Remnant: From the Ashes has to offer me as I continue trudging along in search of an Undying King. Moments like this are where games really come together, where the sometimes-elusive “flow” can finally be felt and anything in this constructed space seems possible.
