Ashfall Reliquary

What is Ashfall Reliquary

Ashfall Reliquary drops you into a sanctum with no corridors and no doors — an open field of ruined ground, rivers of water and lava, and boulders that the eye reads as scenery until you try to walk through one. Varen Ash carries a lantern instead of a sword. Willpower is the whole of it: it is your health, it is your ammunition, and it is the light you see by. Every banishment you cast costs three of it, and it comes back at under five a second, and only after a second and a half without being touched.

Each sanctum asks for three kinds of work in a fixed order. First the soul sigils, three of them in the opening chamber and ten by the last: they are simply collected, and each one gives seven willpower back. Then the seals — up to six standing stones that must be touched in the right order, which from the fourth sanctum onward is not written anywhere but shown once, quickly, and then hidden. Get it wrong and every seal goes dark, the sequence starts again and it costs you willpower. From the fifth sanctum a warden wakes as well, a slow heavy thing with six to thirty-two points of life that must be brought down before the portal will open. Twelve sanctums, three themes — a manor, a grotto, a cemetery — turning over and over as you go down.

How to play

1. Move with WASD or the arrow keys and aim with the mouse; the left button banishes along the aim, and Shift dashes — the dash is short, makes you untouchable while it lasts and takes just over two seconds to recharge. E interacts with a seal or the portal. On a phone the left thumb drives a stick and three buttons on the right banish, interact and dash, with the aim locking on to the nearest wraith.
2. The panel at the top says what the sanctum wants: gather the sigils, then repeat the seal sequence, then bring down the warden. The tasks come in that order and the portal only opens when all of them are done.
3. Willpower is health, ammunition and light at once. A banishment costs 3, being touched by a wraith costs more, and it only regenerates after 1.45 seconds without a hit, at 4.8 a second. Each sigil you pick up returns 7. At zero the run is over.
4. A sanctum pays 60 for every sigil and 90 times its number when the last one is in; 45 for every seal and 120 times its number for the sequence; and on completion 520 times the number, plus up to 1320 for speed — six points come off for every second past the start — plus six for every point of willpower you still hold.

Strategies that work

• From the fourth sanctum on, the seal sequence is shown once and then hidden, one glyph every 0.62 seconds. Do not start walking while it plays: watch it standing still, name the glyphs to yourself, and only then move. A wrong seal darkens every one of them, starts the sequence over and takes willpower with it.
• The dash is the cheapest defence in the game — it costs no willpower at all and you cannot be touched during it. When two wraiths close in, dash through them rather than banishing: a banishment is three willpower and they will still be there.
• Willpower only regenerates after 1.45 seconds without being touched, so a fight you cannot win is a fight that never lets you heal. Break away, put a boulder between you and them, and let the lantern fill before you go back.
• Sigils are worth more than their points: each one returns seven willpower. When you are hurt and the sanctum still has sigils lying about, collecting them is both the objective and the cure.
• The speed bonus is six points a second off a 220-second allowance, so it is worth over a thousand points on an early sanctum and nothing at all after four minutes. Once you have passed that line, stop hurrying: the completion bonus and the willpower bonus do not expire.

A little history

The word reliquary belongs to churches: a box, often absurdly ornate, built to hold a bone or a splinter of something holy. Medieval towns competed for them, and a good relic could pay for a cathedral. What Ashfall Reliquary borrows is not the piety but the arrangement — the idea that the important thing is small, scattered, and needs collecting before anything can be closed. Its sanctums are laid out the way abandoned places actually are: open ground with no path marked on it, obstacles that are only obstacles when you meet them, and things that were once ceremony reduced to a sequence somebody has to remember. Elias's lantern is doing the work that faith used to do, and it runs out just as easily.

Frequently asked questions