Inner Ashes is a well-thought-out narrative walking simulator that puts you in the shoes of someone with Alzheimer’s.
Spanish Independent developer Calathea Game Studio developed Inner Ashes. Inner Ashes was published by both Calathea Game Studio as well as Selecta Play. Selecta Play was established in 2020 and is a part of SelctaVisión, which publishes movies and series that operate mainly in Spain and Portugal.
Inner Ashes is a narrative puzzle walking simulator where you put yourself into the shoes of the main character, Henry. Henry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The main point of the game is to help Henry uncover some of his memories. The difficulty gets more challenging the deeper you go into his memories, and as you walk around his home, many things change in subtle ways. The game is broken down into eight chapters that are split between Henry’s home and his memories.
Although this is a walking simulator, all of the puzzles take place within Henry’s memories. But they aren’t the only things that can be interacted with in the game. You can make a cup of coffee or sculpt a wooden statue in Henry’s home on some of the levels. However, to access the puzzles, you will need to interact with a sketchbook sent to Henry by his daughter Enid. Inner Ashes being narrative-driven means that one of your main objectives is to find out what happened between Henry and Enid.
Their relationship starts off touching with a single father raising his only daughter. Sadly as Alzheimer’s sets in, Henry starts to forget many things; one of those forgotten memories is the reason he and his daughter had a falling out. One of the first memories uncovered is Henry taking his daughter to his wife’s grave and placing down Forget-me-nots.
Henry works as a Forest Guard, looking after a forest near his town. So many of the levels in his memories feature a forest or whimsical theme, which is influenced by the news he reads and the memories you will be unlocking. Such as the desert level that had a newspaper speaking about a drought just before you enter the memories.
To solve many of the puzzles, you will need to return to the world outside of his memories. To do so, you just need to find a couch and sit down. When you come to, you will be sitting on the two-seater couch in the living room. Although not all puzzles take place in his memories. There are tasks that you do around the house, but as Henry’s Alzheimer’s becomes worse, he gets more frustrated with tasks as it feels like he has done it, but it simply resets.
Inner Ashes also has hidden bits of information that are lying around on many different levels. All of it is information on Alzheimer’s, so the game can serve as an educational tool for someone to learn more about Alzheimer’s. The puzzles are also important, as the puzzles at the end of the level are Tangrams. These are puzzles where you have to place the differently shaped blocks in a specific order to complete them.
These puzzles are also used by people with Alzheimer’s for them to strengthen cognition as well as help them feel a sense of accomplishment after completing it. That doesn’t mean they are easy, as you will have to play around with each puzzle to find the correct order in the blocks that go into the puzzle.
These aren’t the only puzzles that you encounter. Most of the puzzles involve grabbing items from the real world. For example, to complete the mosaic puzzle, you must search for a few drawings created by Enid around the house. Once you have them, you have to memorize their location in your inventory, as the closer you get to the mosaic, the more scrambled they become until they are indistinguishable. If you place the incorrect image on the mosaic, you will need to recollect the drawing from the real world. This is one of the many puzzles in place.
Each of the locations you visit within Henry’s memories is big, but they aren’t big enough that it feels tedious, with Inner Ashes being a walking simulator. The items you pick up to solve puzzles don’t appear in something like an inventory bar or bag, as anything you pick up shows up as a sticky note with the image of the item on it.
Each chapter in the sketchbook is finished once you solve the puzzles you will face. After the final puzzle, you will see a drawn cutscene detailing what that memory is about. Each chapter you complete has Enid growing older, and the reason for her deteriorating relationship with her dad, Henry.
Although there aren’t any major bugs are issues in the game. There was a minor issue in the beginning with the English translation of the instructions for the level changing to Spanish, as well as the control info for the tangram puzzle being in Spanish rather than English for one of the levels.
Inner Ashes features a moving story that has voice acting. Unfortunately, some of the English voice acting fell a little flat as it felt rushed. The voice actor for Henry did an excellent job portraying his emotions and making the character come to life. The same cannot be said for Enid, the other character whose voice we often hear throughout the game. It often seems under-acted and rushed, and the emotions are not quite portrayed enough for them to make a significant impact on the scene that is being voiced.
With Inner Ashes having subtitles, it’s easy to play the game with the Spanish voice acting. Although the subtitles don’t account for all the voice acting in the game, it is a nice feature to have. The difference between the two is clear, as the voice actors on the Spanish side have done an excellent job of portraying the characters and the emotions they are going through. In most cases, it creates a heartbreaking dialogue as you dig deeper into Henry’s memories about what happened between him and Enid, his daughter.
The music and background sounds, on the other hand, are done exceptionally well. Each soundtrack and sound effect draws you in as you dive deeper into the story. They add to an already immersive and educational experience as you continue your climb to solve the puzzles and regain Henry’s memories.
The design and graphics are great and lead you off on an almost whimsical note as you explore Henry’s memories, although once you leave them, you return to Henry’s home. Many different details around his home lead to a feeling of losing time as you watch the calendar date move and the newspapers change, indicating months or weeks going by between each memory dive. The cutscenes, however, are all wonderfully drawn and are as detailed as the rest of the game.
Overall, Inner Ashes is an emotional rollercoaster of a walking simulator where every day that you live in Henry’s shoes gets more difficult as time goes on. The game does an excellent job of building awareness of what people with Alzheimer’s go through daily, and it has a captivating story and fun puzzles to go along with it, as well as extra tidbits of information about Alzheimer’s hidden on most levels.
