If I had to describe Chronos: Before the Ashes in three words, they would be “eh, it’s fine.” It’s the prequel to last year’s Remnant: From the Ashes, a game we liked quite a bit. Like Remnant, Chronos is also a take on the Souls-borne-kiro genre. But whereas Remnant was succinctly described as “Dark Souls with guns”, Chronos is “Dark Souls with a sword and shield”. Which is to say, it plays a lot like stock-standard Dark Souls. Apart from some clever design and mechanics, it doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the works of FromSoftware, which was something Remnant did quite handily. Chronos is not a bad game, but it’s certainly not a great game either. It’s just…fine.

Chronos is set in the same world as Remnant, but there’s so little plot here it hardly matters. You play a sad teen tasked with ridding the world of an evil dragon. You must venture out of your Fallout-esque post-apocalyptic base, teleporting to other worlds full of monsters, puzzles, and expository diary entries. Character customisation is scant. You’ve got a choice of two genders (female or male – both white), two starting weapons (sword or axe), and three difficulties (Casual, Adventure, or Heroic) and that’s it. 

Gameplay is very similar to other games of the type. There is a lock-on button, there is a block button, there is a parry button, there is a dodge button, there are light and heavy attacks. There is a stamina bar that goes down when you sprint or block an attack. You collect refillable Dragon Hearts that restore your health. This will sound – and play – familiar if you’ve played others in the genre, but there’s a few ways Chronos sets itself apart.

You have a magic meter that fills up during battle and lets you unleash a temporary power-up, like having increased speed or defence. Whenever you kill an enemy, you accrue experience towards gaining a level. At level up, your health is refilled – which is a godsend when you’ve run out of Dragon Hearts – and you gain skill points to increase your Strength, Dexterity, Arcane, or Vitality stats. Most interestingly, every time you die, your character ages by one year.

I enjoyed fighting this time, and I was able to experiment with blocking and parrying and dodging to respond to enemy attacks. Enemies also didn’t block forever anymore. But lowering the difficulty highlighted the game’s flaws in combat. Chunky animations that trigger half a second after you press the button, enemies landing a hit even after you’ve clearly dodged out of the way, or certain attacks stunning you while your stamina’s full, all add up to an experience that is serviceable, but sloppy. I still enjoyed my time with Adventure mode, and committed myself to getting to grips with the combat, because despite my frustrations with it, I was still having fun. But then I found out that spamming the heavy attack button will stunlock most enemies to death. This was undoubtedly a cheap exploit, but especially when I was running back through a section I’d already played, this was a much more efficient – and honestly, more entertaining – way of getting through the game.

A lot of this sloppiness made sense once I found out this is a port of a game released on the Oculus Rift in 2016. The original Chronos used a fixed camera, whereas Before the Ashes uses a third person perspective. This sounds like a better way to play the game on non-VR consoles, but the camera often gets stuck against walls, and disorientingly rotates whenever you walk through specific doors or interact with ladders, which I couldn’t cancel out of. The game’s origins would also account for why, graphically, Before the Ashes isn’t as appealing or interesting as Remnant. But the art design is charming throughout.