// PC GAMER — GAMING
I need you to play this unbelievably tense 2 hour horror about descending into hell with a grappling hook
Idols of Ash is $3, has over 2,000 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam, and is one of my favourites so far of 2026.
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Idols of Ash looks like another of the droves of low-poly first-person horror games oozing from the 21st century collective consciousness, but it's actually more of a climbing game. I meet the nameless protagonist at the mouth of a mysterious, fathomless pit. For some reason it's my objective to reach the bottom of it.
At first I start to drop down from one platform or outcrop to the next like I would in any other first-person game, or like I would down a well, or the inside of a giant tree, in a Dark Souls game. Idols of Ash reminds me a lot of FromSoft's games, especially of the recurring Miyazaki motif of dropping carefully into an abyss that seems to widen and contort the further I go. The atmosphere here is pure melancholy murk until, with the flip of a dime, it turns skin crawling.
Crucially, I have a grappling hook. This is the trick that Idols of Ash's two hour runtime orbits around. If I hook into where I'm standing I can descend safely into the pit to my rope's full extent. Or, more daringly, I can drop without an anchor and hook onto a surface during my fall. I can also swing with this grappling hook, gaining enough momentum to allow me to make leaps of faith towards distant platforms.
I do this extremely slowly at first, all the better to get a handle on a movement system that becomes more flexible and expressive the more I interact with it. Ain't this nice, I thought: a slowburn exploration game for nyctophiles!
But then a ginormous freaking centipede appeared from the gloom above, snapping me in half with its trunk-sized mandibles. Game over.
The tonal whiplash made me rage quit, if I'm honest, but the promise of that grappling hook and the eerily cylindrical subterranea brought me sulking back. I learned to go fast. The further downward I charted the less I could dare rely on hooking and descending: I had to jump and catch, swing and leap. A growing understanding of the expanse was useful, yes, but so was better knowledge of what kind of surfaces the grappling hook can grapple to, and how much slack I need to make quick scurrying leaps. Sometimes I'd just have to hope for the best.
I reckon that giant centipede had my arse at least a dozen times. Dealing with it became easier when I realised that it doesn't really move much faster than I do, at least on the game's normal difficulty. The centipede forced me to use my instinct and be dextrous. From a design perspective it's basically a manifesto: Leafy Games doesn't want you to descend this hellscape methodically, stopping to take in the depressing sights now and then: It wants you to play this like an arena shooter without a gun.
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