Gaming without battle passes.
Takes without paywalls.
And stories without reposts.
BrokenLore Ascend Preview: A Steel Tower Gives Influencers the Fright of Their Lives
Preview: In BrokenLore: Ascend, two extreme-sports influencers climb a steel tower hundreds of meters tall. Up there, their photo-obsessed ego trip quickly turns into a gruesome fight for survival.
Remember the slightly supernatural 2022 survival thriller Fall? In it, the thrill-seeking friends Hunter and Becky climb an insanely tall transmission tower resembling the real-life KXTV/KOVR Tower. Once they reach the top, part of the ladder collapses, leaving them stranded more than 600 meters above the ground—a genuine nightmare. 😨
I don't know whether BrokenLore: Ascend was inspired by the movie, but there are definitely some similarities. Serafini Productions' game also follows two friends—Ren and Stimp... sorry, Yui—as they climb a massive tower, although this one looks more like the Eiffel Tower than a transmission mast.
It's called the Elysium Tower, it rises high above Japan and, just like the tower in Fall, it's entirely fictional. BrokenLore: Ascend apparently isn't about Ren and Yui getting stranded up there, though. Instead, the influencer duo runs into a Rokurokubi, a yōkai from Japanese folklore whose neck can stretch to freakish lengths.
I got an early chance to step into daredevil Ren's shoes and even give the nasty ghost woman a tap on the shoulder. In this preview, I'll tell you whether this unusual climb has what it takes to become a horror hit.
“See You at the Top!”
Judging by the current demo, BrokenLore: Ascend opens with exactly the sort of hyperactive influencer spiel you'd expect from Ren and Yui, who climb for clicks and fame on their “Skylimit” channel. This time, they plan to scale Japan's tallest building, the Elysium Tower—and naturally, what they're doing isn't exactly legal.
Ren and Yui's social-media video opens with a painfully cool speech straight out of Watch Dogs 2.
That's why the two troublemakers plan to sneak onto the secured site at night through a service tunnel, although the demo I played skips that part entirely. Instead, this bite-sized climb begins right at the foot of the tower, near a patrolling security guard armed with a flashlight.
Yes, BrokenLore: Ascend promises stealth mechanics too, but they're barely present in the preview build. You get past the guard high above the ground by shimmying along a steel beam, while a series of QTE-style interruptions asks you to perform actions that feel almost completely arbitrary.
After shimmying across the beam, you have to stay out of the security guard's flashlight beam. That's about as much “stealth” as the demo contains.
Button Mashing as a Gameplay Cop-Out
While you're hanging from the beam, the game makes you hammer away at various buttons every few meters for no obvious reason. First, you have to press the X button within a short time window; next, you're asked to mash Y as quickly as possible, and so on. Pull it off and Ren happily keeps moving. Fail, and he plunges into the abyss.
All that button chaos makes the section feel pretty strange, but the demo does serve up one skill-based challenge that works rather well: crossing a narrow steel beam while carefully keeping your balance.
An arrow at the top of the screen shows which way Ren is about to tip—see the screenshot below—and you have to compensate using the left and right movement keys. I actually liked this mechanic, even though I've obviously seen plenty of variations on it before.
Balancing is one of BrokenLore: Ascend's better-executed skill mechanics.
What disappointed me most were the “climbing mechanics” promised in the game's description. Why? Because they're barely there. I climb ladders in what feels like every game ever made; scrambling up chain-link fences feels like ordinary movement; and climbing a rope doesn't feel much more like actual climbing than using a ladder. None of it really sells the sense of height, either.
Climbing ladders and chain-link fences looks good, but it barely gives your stomach anything to worry about.
The climb is occasionally broken up by short interactive diversions involving photos and graffiti. One example comes when the apparently fearless Yui (small but mighty) balances across the steel beam I mentioned earlier. Every so often, she stops halfway across and poses on one leg, at which point you have to hit the shutter button on your phone camera.
Don't expect a more elaborate photography mechanic with zoom, filters or effects, though. At least in the demo, taking pictures doesn't really serve any purpose. And when you're asked to spray the Skylimit logo onto designated wooden panels, the emblem simply appears as you wave the spray can around. Fair enough—maybe the final version won't take the easy way out.
Ren and Stimpy occasionally do influencer stuff atop the Elysium Tower.
Plenty of Horror Atmosphere
Not sounding too hot so far, is it? Well, BrokenLore: Ascend definitely has its strengths too. Aside from the fact that I find the whole tower premise refreshingly unusual and worth exploring, Serafini's latest game scores major points for atmosphere—and as we all know, horror games live or die by it.
On the one hand, there isn't much to look at besides damp steel structures and thick banks of fog. On the other, that fog shrouds the Elysium Tower in a genuine sense of mystery. And judging by what the demo already hints at, something may well be lurking inside it.
The tower certainly isn't short on eerie atmosphere.
The Rokurokubi gets her big moment right at the end. In this scene, the woman in the traditional kimono is naturally standing with her back to you—we've known that routine since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, if not longer. Sure enough, your hand slowly and dramatically reaches toward her shoulder and...
No, the game doesn't go for the usual “boo!” jumpscare. Instead, the Rokurokubi suddenly does her best giraffe impression: her neck shoots upward until her head disappears out of frame, swings around somewhere above you and then darts straight back into your face. “Nice,” I thought. “Let's see what happens next.” Well, nothing did. That was the end of the BrokenLore: Ascend demo.
This encounter with the yōkai is unfortunately the only one in the demo.
Verdict: It Could Still Go Either Way
On the technical side, BrokenLore: Ascend doesn't make a great impression in its current demo build. Unless your PC has at least an RTX 40-series or RX 7000-series graphics card, you can pretty much forget about maxing out the visuals—unless you're happy with less than 40 FPS. There's still a lot of optimization work to be done before the game launches later this year.
Ren's somewhat unresponsive controls won't be to everyone's taste either. At first, I had to get used to him taking his sweet time to move from a standstill instead of immediately settling into a normal walking pace. Before long, though, I stopped minding.
Add the fact that, aside from the whole snake-neck business, the demo mostly serves up familiar fare, and things don't look particularly bright for BrokenLore: Ascend. At least on paper. Because it still has one serious ace up its sleeve: that intriguing tower setting, topped off with Japanese folklore.
If the release version can iron out the technical issues and crank up the fear factor and shock moments, the fourth entry in the BrokenLore series could hit pretty hard. It certainly has my attention, and I'm hoping for the best.
Read next:
