Ash & Rust

Ash & Rust is a top-down action RPG set in a dark fantasy world. You play as an Entity pulled from the Aether and recruited as one of many OMENs: agents granted power and authority in exchange for serving overlords, creatures and companies. Your missions take you to distant places and bring you into contact with a range of characters, some fearful of your arrival and others welcoming it. Your choices can shape the influence you build and the mark you leave on the world.

Shape your build

Abilities, Traits and Gear interact through a grid-based inventory system. You place Augment shapes in your Activated Inventory to enable them, and fitting more shapes into the available space lets you amass more power. You design abilities from scratch by selecting from four base types, then choosing a payload and Element type; as you level, you can add as many augments as fit. Hundreds of augment and equipment options support different playstyles. For example, the Spell Weaving trait builds a buff each time you cast a different ability, while casting the same ability twice in a row resets the stacks.

Fight with timing

Attacks use animations and collider-hit physics, and abilities have animation timings and cooldowns. Movement and casts have weight, so you need to time attacks and animations to dodge enemy abilities, block projectiles and set up counterattacks. Enemies and bosses use AI Behavior Trees to react to your actions, including moving out of area-of-effect attacks, kiting and dodging.

Explore and choose

You explore mysterious places, meet characters and take on branching quests with dialogue choices that shape the paths available to you. You can customize your character’s physical appearance. The game also includes multiple end-game modes, each with its own mechanics, leaderboards and achievements.

Loot and design

Weapons, Gear, Augments, Trinkets and other loot can significantly affect your power, build and playstyle. Character power uses additive rather than multiplicative stat scaling; many stats have diminishing returns, while large areas of effect require substantial augment investment, limiting the power available elsewhere in a build. Combat is based on using your build to defeat enemies, rather than on environmental traps, vehicles or turrets, or long-cooldown transformation forms. New content is intended to introduce additional playstyles, builds and combat strategies without making existing content obsolete.