ASHES RAIN is an action puzzle video game developed and published by RED HOUSE and Matrix Software.

About

ASHES RAIN is an action puzzle game where a lone girl and a solitary small robot (known in this world as a “Gearman”) cooperate to ascend a tower-like city shrouded in falling ashes.

Together, they can overcome the challenges and mechanisms that they couldn’t surmount individually. They cooperate and complement each other’s shortcomings, gradually solving the puzzles.

The city itself seems lifeless, an eerily quiet ruin where many incapacitated Gearmen are huddled in the ashes. When the girl ignites their souls, a portion of their functionalities is revived, and they assist in resolving the puzzles.

This is a warm light kindled in a world that seems piled with corpses. Our goal is to create a game that allows players to experience the healing and poignancy of the girl’s kindness and redemption, as well as the inevitable sense of loss.

Key Features

• Uniquely Beautiful Visuals
  • A world portrayed by Kiyoshi Arai—poetic, solitary, imbued with loneliness, and subtly beautiful despite harboring destruction.
  • This worldview, painstakingly constructed with a dedication to artistic rather than photorealistic rendering, is being sublimated into a game with tasteful 3D visuals by the Matrix development team using Unreal Engine 5.
  • The aim is to create a space where the user, tired after a day’s work, can pause in the middle of the game and feel a bit healed just by being in this space, a place to breathe and empathize. We want to create a time where you can be alone.
  • Because it’s an indie game, we are themed around providing a humble place of empathy for people who think the world might already be over in some corner of the world.
  • On the other hand, you’re not the only one who’s alone. There still might be hope in the world.
  • We want to support these ideas with visuals and music, beautifully and fleetingly, and direct them with absolute affirmation.
• A Puzzle Game Where a Girl and a Small Gearman (Known as Coro) Unravel Mysteries While Compensating for Each Other’s Shortcomings
  • The player characters are a girl and a Gearman. The game unfolds as a buddy story involving these two.
  • While there are many things a girl can do, there are also many things she cannot do, such as not being able to get into a small hole. In those cases, she is responsible for maneuvering the Coro through the tunnel and triggering the puzzle gimmick.
  • Also, Coro can serve as a replacement for the hearts of the huddled Gearmen scattered throughout the city, allowing them to operate and assist the girl.
  • We aim to create a puzzle game that not only involves solving the game while controlling the universal actions of the girl and the acrobatic actions of Coro the Gearman, but also creates an emotionally engaging buddy narrative in terms of visuals.
• The Impact of Music
  • Our game pays particular attention to sound effects in order to express its worldview. The same consideration is given to the music that serves as the background score, thinking of it as an extension of the sound effects.
  • There is no arbitrary BGM simply flowing in the background in our game. Music has a distinct point of origin, like a radio, which starts off faint but becomes clearer as you approach its source.
  • The music that pours from this radio, the person playing it, the one conveying the words. Among them, there is certainly an echo of an SOS.
  • The girl ventures to find the source of the radio signal in order to save this person. By using music as a guide and integrating it into the game system, we aim to enhance the gaming experience through both visuals and sounds, presenting a rich worldview.