Return to Ash is a game that mistakes verbosity for depth, and drags its players through a mire of awkward dialogue, aesthetic half-measures, and a story that can’t decide whether to be profound or just plain pretentious.
Developed and published by Serenity Forge, Return to Ash is a low-effort Twine-based Ren’Py visual Novel based on the afterlife.
At its core, Return to Ash wants to be a melancholic meditation on death, identity, and purpose. But what it delivers is a bloated, self-indulgent monologue machine wrapped in faux-deep narrative fragments and art direction that feels just a few years too late to be stylish.
A Death March of Dialogue
The most defining and damning feature of Return to Ash is its approach to dialogue.
Every. Single. Line is wrapped in a redundant cocoon of internal monologue. Before your character speaks, they think about what they’re going to say. Then they say it. Then they analyse what they just said.
It’s a constant cycle of hesitation, reflection, and pseudo-intellectual rambling that turns even the simplest interactions into emotional marathons. Occasionally, you’re given dialogue options, but most of the time, the game just decides for you, and still insists on making you sit through the character’s three-layered thought process.
Instead of helping you connect to the character, this structure smothers the narrative in noise. It feels like being trapped in a teenager’s diary entry for ten hours.
Visually Flat
Return to Ash attempts to present itself as a moody, surrealist purgatory, featuring stark hospital lighting and minimalist backdrops. At a distance, some of the environments are visually striking. But up close, the animation style collapses into flat, lifeless, and outdated 2D cutouts.
There’s an effort to create visual contrast between the sterile purgatory and the quirky characters who inhabit it, but it all ends up looking like a mismatched collage. Rather than being eerie or poetic, it feels awkwardly assembled.
The Story that Wasn’t
You play as a recently deceased, terminally ill patient thrust into a limbo-like realm run by Death—a petulant teenage shut-in who bullies other souls and spends their time designing unwinnable video games.
The world is populated by other lost souls, all performing meaningless tasks in hopes of redemption, revival, or release. There’s no immediate goal, just vague suggestions that you, too, must convince Death to let you go.
It could have been a clever take on the afterlife. A sort of existential bureaucracy meets surreal comedy. But instead, the writing sinks it.
The tone veers between melodrama and cringey “edgy” humour, and the story’s pacing is drowned by its over-written dialogue. Characters feel like stereotypes in search of substance. Especially the one major NPC, a workaholic man constantly belittled by Death, who seems to exist solely to deliver exposition or serve as emotional bait.
Deathly Hollow Experience
Return to Ash isn’t broken in a technical sense. But it is broken in execution.
Its systems, both narrative and visual, are constantly undermined by the game’s obsession with its voice. Instead of trusting the player to find meaning in its world, it spells everything out three times. And even then, nothing meaningful is said.
There are interesting ideas beneath all the clutter. The purgatory setting, the premise of negotiating with Death, and the existential tone. It all could have worked. But Return to Ash doesn’t know when to stop talking long enough to let any of it breathe.
It’s a game that mistakes introspection for depth, and in doing so, loses itself entirely.
PS: Re-using the tutorial code of Ren’py and editing the colour palette does not make you a game developer.
