Remnant: From the Ashes was one of the quiet successes of the year. The co-op, Souls-like shooter sold a million across PC, Xbox, and PlayStation in about two months, and Gunfire Games is working on some nebulous new stuff for 2020. I liked the approach Gunfire took to making a 'generated' game: Remnant's straightforward character progression; its handmade but randomly-assembled level layouts; its dumb laser shotgun.

I wouldn't call Remnant a roguelike, partly because it isn't randomized in the way that Enter the Gungeon, Spelunky, or other games in that genre are. When you start a campaign, Remnant generates a unique seed for your save file that locks your whole playthrough to a personal set of secrets, bosses, and items, drawn from a small library of those things. In my game, when I reached The Tempest Court area, I always had to fight Totem Father, a towering shaman who guards an arena of stone pillars. But my friend in Discord had never seen that boss: they'd always fought The Ravager in its place, a giant wolf. 

I played the same game as my buddies, but we encountered different stuff. I hadn't had this feeling in more than a decade: the urge to swap stories with a small friend group, trying to out-surprise one another with the rare loot or secret rooms we'd stumbled on.

In the fog of launch week, without guides and many YouTube clips to light the way, we traded screengrabs and self-recorded clips in Discord (more evidence that when you play a game matters as much as anything). It took me a dozen tries to kill the tree dragon waiting at the end of Act 1, but my friend cakewalked past a towering Ent in his campaign. A third friend later claimed that if you break the Ent's tree trunk legs before killing him, Remnant drops a totally different weapon reward. "Oh yeah, and did you find the guy who sells soup in the crashed helicopter? Talk to him 25 times and he gives you his pocket watch." Yeah, right.

It's not the same feeling as, say, getting a slightly more powerful sword from a boss in Diablo than your buddy. In order to get some of the Remnant guns, melee weapons, and weapon mods that my friends acquired, I had to join their campaign in multiplayer and they had to lead me by the hand toward something I'd never seen before. It was really fun to return the favor with random, lower-level public players—there's a humble vendor that transforms into a miniboss at one point in the game, and triggering this fight without warning surprised the hell out of my co-op teammate. "Hey kid, watch this."

Remnant's division of content was my favorite thing about the game because it resurrected something I thought the internet had killed long ago: the urban legends that friends and I used to trade about the games we were playing. 

In the '90s, before we could simply speak into our kitchens and be heard by Google, it was hard to verify the tall tales your friends told you about the games they were playing. If you click the cows in Diablo 99 times, it'll open a secret portal to a Cow Level! Yeah, and you can actually save Aeris and get a different cutscene if you equip the special Materia. My brother says that if you put two CDs in the tray, it mixes the games together into a single game. 

In this ancient age of locally-grown misinformation, no one knew anything. Even slightly obscure strategies became big pieces of insight: If you put the Two Swords ability on a Monk in Final Fantasy Tactics, they'll punch twice. 

It's an experience that's almost unavailable to us in 2019. If wikis, walkthroughs, and guides don't contain the answer you need, you can just ask a developer yourself on Twitter or Reddit. It's true that forum culture has still managed to produce prominent hoaxes that have taken a life of their own, like Minecraft's Herobrine character. But for the most part, the age of mystery has been replaced by certainty, and I didn't expect a 2019 game to bring it back. 

The third-person survival shooter Remnant: From the Ashes is getting a new Adventure Mode later this week that will enable players to "re-roll" the Ruined Earth, Rhom, and Yaesha biomes without having to play all the way through the main campaign first. Developer Gunfire Games said the new mode, which can be activated from the World Stone in Ward 13, will let players "explore dungeons,encounter new enemies, or fight their favorite (or toughest!) world bosses" in dynamically generated biomes. 

What's big about this is that it gives players the ability to grind areas of the game to their heart's content, without disrupting their campaign progress. "In addition to giving players a chance to uncover all of the game’s secrets, all of their progress and items obtained in Adventure Mode stay with their character, so they can keep rolling in order to obtain all of the many weapons, armors, mods, and other items the game has to offer," Gunfire said.

One week after Adventure Mode arrives, a new quest called Leto's Lab will open up, giving players an opportunity to tour Research Station Alpha, where head researcher Leto Apostolakis investigated his theory that the mysterious World Stones could be used to cross the space-time continuum almost instantaneously. That sounds like the sort of thing that inevitably leads to trouble, and of course it did, as Apostolakis "started using the World Stones to fuel a series of dubious experiments." The situation eventually unspooled to the point that the lab had to be evacuated, and now it's time for you to go back in and deal with light puzzles and heavy combat, including an all-new boss fight.

Remnant: From the Ashes Adventure Mode will go live on September 12, followed by Leto's Lab on September 19. Both are free for all players, and will appear as regular updates.

At a glance, Remnant: From the Ashes looks like it was coughed out by a game development algorithm. It’s a third-person looter-shooter and a Dark Souls-inspired boss rush, with an emphasis on co-op and a dynamically generated campaign. Stylistically it's inspired by fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, post-apocalyptic worlds like Fallout and Gears of War, and various kinds of horror fiction, most notably the SCP Foundation. Even the title reads like it was generated by a Twitter bot.

I was apprehensive going in, but was surprised by how much I enjoyed Remnant. It’s a bizarre game, and it's completely shameless in how it assembles borrowed concepts, but like a wasteland vehicle from a Mad Max film, it works.

Ashes to castles

Initially, my scepticism appeared well-founded. Remnant gets off to an underwhelming start. Its introduction sees your custom character washed up on an island with nothing but the clothes on their back and a brittle-looking sword. The ensuring tutorial guides you through some bleak city ruins, instructing you in the basics of roll-dodging and melee attacks while you’re assaulted by tree-people known as the Root.

Eventually you end up at Ward 13, the Firelink Shrine of Remnant’s world. Here you learn that the Root have taken over all of Earth and the only way to stop them is by destroying the heart of the Root located in a nearby tower. Unfortunately, the only person who knows how to get into the Tower—a man known as the Founder—has disappeared.

Despite the fact that you’ve just arrived, have been recently wounded, and your only significant contribution to Ward 13 is restoring the power, the leader of the Ward decides you’re the person to track down the Founder. You’re given a couple of guns and a contrived-looking outfit based around your starting class, and are sent out to explore the island’s destroyed city.

It’s a lackluster opening, and the first hour of the campaign doesn't fare much better. Remnant’s representation of a destroyed Earth is generic and dull, like Gears of War viewed through bloodshot eyes. It’s all rusted piles of rubble, hollowed-out tower blocks, and dank brown sewers. The only saving grace is that you don’t have much time to admire the scenery, as the Root are up in your face like pollen in summertime.

While Remnant resembles a cover shooter, in practice it plays much more like Dark Souls from an over-the-shoulder perspective. Even basic enemies are aggressive and hit hard, so to stay alive for any length of time you need to evade their attacks. You also can’t rely on enemies dropping ammo, and you burn through your own supply quickly, so where possible it's best to get up close and personal, dispatching opponents with your melee attacks.

Gradually, you pick your way through the ruins, moving between glowing crystals analogous to Dark Souls’ bonfires and fighting some creatively-designed bosses (more on those later). It’s all fine, but nothing stands out about the design. Then, as you’re walking down another grey and dilapidated street, Remnant suddenly conjures a castle out of the sky, and the whole game becomes far more interesting.

Guns that shoot bees

Within minutes of this event, you’re no longer wandering the ruins of Earth. You’re on Rhom, a desert planet populated by spear-chucking cavemen, living in the shadow of ancient obsidian obelisks that stab upwards to a sun caught in an eternal eclipse. It’s the beginning of a brilliantly bonkers pan-dimensional adventure. It’s also the moment when the game’s systems start to pay off.

Unlike The Division, which drip-feeds the player incrementally better guns, Remnant’s loot is less common and more tailored. You’ll pick up one or two interesting items per area, usually a ring or a necklace that provides a specific buff. The real treasures, however, are dropped by bosses: powerful items which can be taken back to Ward 13 to craft new weapons and weapon mods.

These weapons are as unique as the bosses used to make them. After defeating a fire-spitting demon called Singe, I crafted a submachinegun that fired incendiary bullets as a default, with a power that turned it into a flamethrower. During my time with Remnant, I also wielded a gauss rifle that created black holes, a pistol that fired swarms of bees, and a radioactive beam-rifle. Some weapons have replaceable mod powers, letting you modify your favourite gun with an area-of-effect heal or the ability to summon a minion to your side.

It’s an exciting and creative arsenal, far more compelling than a torrent of nigh-identical assault rifles. I didn’t see as much variety with either melee weapons or armour, but it is possible that I didn’t encounter them because of the way Remnant’s campaign works.

Remnant’s most unique feature is its dynamically-generated campaign. Environments can be laid out in different ways and dungeons located in different places, while some areas may or may not appear in your campaign at all. Similarly, each boss encounter has several possible variants. (If you get stuck, you can re-roll your campaign, maintaining your character progress but regenerating the world.)

I played through the first half of Remnant twice, and in the second run, Singe was replaced by the Ent, a giant tree with a face like Cthulhu. I should also point out that there are tons of standard enemy types—I’d estimate around a dozen per world—and bar a couple of annoying exceptions, most of them are fun to fight.

The dynamic generation is a clever way of encouraging you to invest in other player’s campaigns to see more of the game. Of course, this means you’ll need to play Remnant multiple times to see everything. Yet for a game that borrows from both The Division and Dark Souls, Remnant plays fast. Your first campaign will likely take you anywhere between 12 and 20 hours depending on how you cope with the challenge. With a high-level character, however, you could potentially do a complete run on normal difficulty in half that time.

Style salad

Remnant is a better game than first impressions indicate, but that isn’t to say it becomes pure brilliance after an hour. My biggest gripe with Remnant is that, while the boss encounters look great, in practice they’re far too reliant on spamming players with mob enemies to make them challenging. Making boss fights cater for between one and three players in terms of challenge can’t be easy, but the effect of Remnant’s approach is that, rather than thinking about what the upcoming boss is going to be like, you’re thinking, “I hope the mob spawns aren’t too awkward on this one”.

Elsewhere, although I’m glad Remnant quickly moves away from its grungy apocalypse into world-hopping weirdness, it's a strange stylistic salad, combining elements with seemingly no relation to each other. The issue partly lies with how Remnant borrows Dark Souls’ approach to storytelling, using item descriptions and fragmented conversations with NPCs to build its lore piecemeal. Dark Souls’ world is cogent, consistent, and painstakingly built, whereas Remnant too often feels like it’s making things up as it goes along. There are plot reasons for this revealed right at the end, but it feels like a cop-out, veering dangerously close to one of the most wearisome clichés in storytelling.

There are a couple of more specific problems, too. During my playthrough, both myself and my main cooperative partner experienced several crashes to desktop, which is not something you want to happen in the middle of a boss fight. Meanwhile, the Dragon Heart—Remnant’s equivalent of an Estus Flask—takes too long to use considering the mob-heavy nature of most boss encounters. Lastly, if you die during a game, you’re stuck watching your co-op buddies until either they die or you respawn. It would be useful to be able to view your inventory in such circumstances, tinkering with weapon builds or reading item descriptions.

Nonetheless, Remnant's strange worlds, robust challenge, and unique loot make it a refreshing alternative to the drab militarism of The Division. Ubisoft’s game may be more well-rounded overall, but Remnant is undoubtedly more interesting. Given some adjustments, it could become one of the best examples of its genre around.

The last game name I expect Gunfire Games president David Adams to drop is Terraria. We're talking about Remnant: From the Ashes, his studio's attempt to make a big, deeply replayable third person shooter. Every quest, area, and boss fight is hand-designed, but the world you explore will be stitched together with procedural generation, so every run will be different. "Honestly, the game that inspired us the most was Terraria," Adams says. That's a surprise, coming from the team that made the Darksiders series—but it makes sense pretty quick.

"Obviously, [Remnant] is a completely different game than that," Adams says. "But there was a really good sense of exploration and adventure in that game. So we [thought] hey, if there was a full 3D game with RPG elements and all this stuff, but had that same level of exploration and secrets, that'd be super cool. That's where it started a million years ago."

Adams tells me he has a hard time playing any game on New Game+, because once he knows what to expect, he loses interest. But their team loves to make exploration-driven adventure games, like Darksiders. Procedural generation—and packing the world with secrets—was the answer for doing both.

That Makes Remnant: From the Ashes sort of a weird hybrid of loot-driven games like Destiny and Diablo, designed to be endlessly repeated, and more traditional, linear games. When the game generates a world for you, the layouts of the environments will be different, and there's no telling what quests will be available or what other quests they'll connect to. And because there's a layer of meta progression in Remnant, where you go back to your main hub before "rolling" a new world to explore, progress between related quests can end up carrying over between runs.

It sounds like a clever mix of a more traditional singleplayer adventure and a game like Diablo, where story events are the same but the layout of a level changes every time.

Adams gives me an example: You run into an old man out in the world, who seems like a normal merchant at first, but depending on how you interact with him you can get his pocket watch. If you have that watch when you meet his son, who is actually a mini boss, things will go very differently than they would otherwise.

"That quest is a great example, because it actually has three potential outcomes depending on if you're playing in multiplayer, if you're playing in solo, if you found his father and you have the pocket watch," he says. "A lot of these quests have multiple ways to play out, depending on what else generated in the world or what else you've done in the world... We have different ways of tying the quest into the random generation system so that it knows, for instance, if one quest is a dependency of another quest, or if it's a loose dependency, meaning they're linked but they don't have to necessarily be on the same world."

The same way they would in an adventure game like Darksiders, Remnant's designers are trying to pack the game full of secrets, some begging to be discovered, others more deeply hidden. For example, every boss will drop an alternate award if you defeat it a certain way, but it's not as simple as, say, Monster Hunter, where if you slice off a tail during the battle you get an extra monster part.

"We didn't want to be like, oh, you shoot the tail off of this creature and it gives you a boss weapon, and that's how it is on every boss," Adams says. "We do that shtick once, and then every boss breaks it up."

Some secrets will take you through multiple runs, quests and puzzles with multiple outcomes that play into the procedural generation. Even though the game is, as Adams points out, moment-to-moment mostly a co-op shooter, piecing together those solutions and alternate paths will hopefully go a long way towards luring in players like me who prefer discovery over grinding levels again and again. In the couple hours of Remnant: From the Ashes I played at a preview event, the environments felt a little empty, a little generically post-apocalyptic, but talking to Adams has me interested in looking at them more closely.

Again, it comes back to Terraria.

"I remember one of the defining moments was, 'you think there's islands up in the clouds?' 'I don't know, let's build a giant ladder,'" says Adams. "And there were actually islands up in the clouds, which was an amazing moment."

At Gunfire Games there's an office bet on how long some of the secrets and quest outcomes will last before they're dissected and posted to a wiki. There's one that Adams thinks might never be found unless they give it away. But another he decided to give us a leg up on.

"Write this down, because I don't want people to miss it," he says. "I won't tell you what it is, but there's a secret right at the beginning of the game that 95% of people walk right past. But it unlocks a completely hidden area in the game with cool stuff, and there's an awesome gun down there. But in the play test, I think one out of 20 people actually do it."

And that area, naturally, "has its own secrets within it." I can almost picture the twinkle in his eye as he says it.

Remnant: From the Ashes is out on PC in just a month, on August 20. If you, like me, played and loved Gunfire's Oculus Rift launch game Chronos, you may be excited to hear Remnant is set in the same world, and there are definitely some connections between the two.

Remnant: From the Ashes, Gunfires Games' cooperative survival shooter, is set in a devastated world full of radiation and monstrous beasties, and in a new trailer we get a closer look at the aggressively unpleasant wasteland players will fight their way through in a couple of months.

"From the lonely desert dunes, to the dark canyon crevices, Rhom contains echoes of a once great civilisation," reads the trailer synopsis. "Whatever hospitality there once was in these cities has been reduced to a steel graveyard of the twisted and hollowed buildings, full of dangerous beings not of our world, but have gained an appreciation for the taste of our flesh."

Last week we got to see another trailer, revealing at the PC Gaming Show. Check it out below. 

In Evan's Remnant: From the Ashes preview, he said it sits somewhere in the middle of The Division 2 and Left 4 Dead, where three players have to band together to go on dungeon runs in a randomly-generated post-apocalyptic Earth, fight bosses and get better gear, but where collecting piles of loot isn't the focus. He also made a more unexpected comparison. 

"Taking together what's promised and what I played, the game that Remnant reminds me of the most is probably the top-down roguelike Enter the Gungeon. You're able to recognize some layouts and the tendencies of the spawning systems over time, but the way things are arranged feels shuffled and unpredictable from playthrough to playthrough, and the promise of deeply-buried secrets is a good carrot for that 83rd playthrough. Even if Remnant doesn't consider itself a looter shooter, it'll be subject to a lot of the same expectations around updates and longevity, but I think its emphasis on 'less is more' looting could attract a different audience."

Remnant: From the Ashes is due out on Steam on August 20. 

At The PC Gaming Show today, show sponsor Perfect World showed off a new trailer for Remnant: From the Ashes, a third-person survival shooter from Gunfire Games.

Basically, the world is screwed—the apocalypse happened, as it is wont to do in games—and everything is overrun by monsters. It's up to you and up to two co-op partners to wipe them out. Watch the trailer above, and see the entire segment from the PC Gaming Show below.

The devs are clearly going for a Souls feel, with giant, grotesque bosses that lay down big attacks for players to dodge. While Remnant can be played solo, Gunfire recommends playing co-op to "increase your chances of survival." Fair enough. In the trailer above, one enemy easily grabs a player with horrible hook hands and raises them like an animal to be slaughtered. Having friends to help is probably a good idea.

Below: Our backstage interview with the developers of Remnant: From the Ashes.

At the show, Gunfire games CEO David Adams talked a bit about the procedural generation in Remnant. "One of the coolest features of the game is the dynamic generation system," said Adams. "We generate the map, the enemies, the quests, the NPCs, bosses, everything.

"It's all hand scripted but the system takes all the pieces and stitches them together."

Remnant: From the Ashes will release on August 20, and Adams announced at the PC Gaming Show today that those who pre-order will get early, "VIP" access on August 16. You can learn more on the official site.

Remnant: From the Ashes occupies a space somewhere between the dopamine-soaked looting of The Division 2 and the scrappy co-op of Left 4 Dead. 

This is a third-person, three-player online action game about going on endless dungeon runs, fighting bosses, and accumulating new weapons and armor for persistent characters. But it's not about grinding through piles of junk gear in the way that Diablo or Destiny often are. 

"There is loot, but our mantra has always been that every item in the game is given the treatment of a legendary item in another game," says David Adams, co-founder and president at Gunfire Games, the studio behind Darksiders II and III. "Instead of endless drops of incrementally different items, we have a bunch of handcrafted, unique items for the player to discover." 

You can visit vendors in Remnant's hub level to upgrade the base attributes of weapons and armor with crafting resources, but this takes a backseat to bigger augments that will add entirely new alternate fire modes to weapons, and there will be a separate tier of guns that only bosses drop. 

Though his studio is smaller than the likes of Bungie and Ubisoft, Adams is eager to differentiate his team's game, which he says doesn't belong to the looter-shooter subgenre. Yes, damage numbers float over enemies as you fight them. Yes, there's a standard inventory screen where you might swap your body armor to optimize your dodge rolling for an upcoming boss fight. As I play an early version of Remnant, the experience does feel less cluttered and more streamlined. 

The studio's goal is to create an action game that maximizes replayability by doubling down on procedural generation and variety. "As a simple example," Adams tells me, "one time through the game you may face off against a dragon as the final boss in our Ruined City world, the second time through you may face off against a giant tree. Bosses, events, dungeons, layouts—all of these things are randomized each time you play, allowing you to replay the game without having to replay the exact same game."

Games that promise bottomlessness rarely deliver what we hope they will. It's encouraging to hear that Remnant will have over 100 enemies and 20-plus bosses (Adams remarks in respectful disbelief during my hands-on that The Division only has a handful of unique character rigs), but without playing the full campaign, I can't tell how distinct the behavior of these creatures will be. They'll be spread across four worlds, and most of these worlds will have four zones of their own, meaning their art won't be uniform. 

The exact depth of Remnant's content well remains to be seen, but I was able to get the most basic sense of it after playing for about an hour. Replaying a section on the opening world, an Earth that's been ravaged by—let me check my notes—a race of interdimensional tree aliens, Remnant was dealing me new layouts in open city areas and narrow, underground utility tunnels. Each time I reloaded the zone the game laid out a map with different amounts of cover, new stairway arrangements, or threw a different miniboss at me.  

These differently-arranged level pieces came at the expense of some decoration, though, and were pretty desolate as my character brushed by them. The generated-ness of the map was evident from the lack of stuff like environmental storytelling. There are only so many ways you can arrange bathroom skeletons, but I'd love to see more polish in this area. Adams does say that Remnant will have "a lot of secrets ... lots of little things for players to discover and unfold within the game world," so I'm looking forward to seeing how that weaves into its procedural generation.

Overall, I did like the art direction of the Earth level, the way everything feels like it's covered in a layer of world-ending dust allows the ruby hues of enemy bodies to stand out as threats without the use of clunky UI. But if XCOM 2 can find ways to tell tiny stories on its randomized chessboards, Remnant can too.

Gunfire gunplay 

In your hands, Remnant's over-the-shoulder combat style feels measured, heavier than games like The Division. You don't feel like you're controlling a linebacker in plate mail like in Gears of War—Resident Evil might be the better comparison. 

Adams describes the combat style as deliberate. "We don't want players running in and just shooting everything in sight with no thought or concern for what they are fighting. Combat is meant to be tough, but rewarding. Uniquely, it also features a seamless combination of both melee and ranged combat. While guns are the primary weapon in the game, players can seamlessly incorporate melee into their combat—and, in fact, most players will find themselves switching back and forth depending on which enemies they are facing."

This is exactly what I experienced. One of my least favorite minions were packs of spherical monsters that charged at me in underground sewer areas. These mobs of angry grey beach balls attacked in messy rows, and trying to shoot them all down one by one with a pistol or rifle proved less effective than just waiting for them to get in at knee-level and timing a melee swing to one-shot several of them at a time.

It's safe to say that Remnant isn't trying to be Dark Souls. The basic enemies spawning in the earliest areas of the game were simple to dispatch. But I was happy that the mixed enemy compositions eventually meant that I couldn't exploit the same dodge roll in every situation, and had to make basic but fun considerations about when to just swap weapons, when to reload, and when to conserve ammo with a melee strike. It surprised me that one of the biggest enemies I saw was the fastest, a burly spear-thrower in Remnant's jungle world who would occasionally blur into a horizontal dash.

Taking together what's promised and what I played, the game that Remnant reminds me of the most is probably the top-down roguelike Enter the Gungeon. You're able to recognize some layouts and the tendencies of the spawning systems over time, but the way things are arranged feels shuffled and unpredictable from playthrough to playthrough, and the promise of deeply-buried secrets is a good carrot for that 83rd playthrough. Even if Remnant doesn't consider itself a looter shooter, it'll be subject to a lot of the same expectations around updates and longevity, but I think its emphasis on 'less is more' looting could attract a different audience.

Remnant will release on Steam on August 20 at $40.