Walking Simulators can be hit-or-miss. Sometimes mechanical problems can cause a strong narrative to be bogged down or even missed entirely. In the case of Inner Ashes, a profound story is present, but a few issues keep it from being a great experience.

Inner Ashes tells the story of a man named Henry, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s and trying to piece his life back together. The story deals with the strained relationship with his daughter Enid, who uses sketches and drawings to try and help her father keep ahold of their history. As such, as you explore the dreamy, surreal, colorful worlds of Henry’s mind, you’ll find sketches Enid drew, as well as documents and letters detailing what is going on currently in Henry’s life.

There are various puzzles involved in exploring Henry’s mindscape. Normally I would enjoy this sort of puzzling exploration, but a few issues impede the experience. The largest problem is that Henry’s walking speed is incredibly slow. This normally isn’t an issue for me in walking sims, but connected to the next problem it becomes a bigger issue.

Certain puzzles in Inner Ashes are very easy to soft-lock. What I mean by that is, if you don’t do the puzzle exactly the right way or in the right order, your progress will stall. This means you’ll have to restart the section by going to the main menu. Most games account for this by making it possible to do puzzle objectives out of order or being careful to only let you do things one way.

The problem with this is that it becomes frustrating to have to restart a level multiple times because of what I hope is a bug. If the design was intentionally done that way, it makes it even worse. The re-treading of ground you’ve already crossed at a snail’s pace is frustrating.

I wanted to enjoy Inner Ashes, and I think the way the story is told is very interesting. However, the Nintendo Switch version seems to suffer from a variety of problems. Aside from the soft-locking problems, there are sections that seem to have issues loading in textures. I’d walk into an area and suddenly the entire section would load all at once. It was jarring to see the unloaded area suddenly clip in, but that’s a minor complaint compared to the problems with some of the levels soft-locking.

Inner Ashes has no negative reviews on Steam, so I have to guess that these issues are Switch specific. I would warn though that there seem to be a few translation errors too, so if that kind of thing bothers you, it’s something to be aware of. I can’t really recommend the Switch version of Inner Ashes, even as much as I’d like to.

The story is great, the colors and environments are pretty, and the message is very profound. I love that they tried to accurately portray the effects of Alzheimer’s disease in a walking simulator/puzzle game. Though I think some games (such as Before I Forget) have done it better, Inner Ashes is worth your time if you can get it on sale.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Inner Ashes was provided by Selecta Play for this review.

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Inner Ashes

$14.99 USD

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Colorful Environments
• Profound Story

Cons

• Easy to Break Puzzles
• Translation Errors
• Slow Walking Speed
• No Checkpoints in the Middle of Puzzles