The Ascent is an intense, fast-paced action RPG that's part Diablo, part twin-stick shooter, and quietly one of the best games of 2021. The combat is gloriously brutal and crunchy, but it's the setting—a vast, bustling city called the Arcology—that really makes it special. This colossal, monolithic tower is one of many covering the surface of the corporation-dominated planet Veles, and is essentially an entire city squeezed into a skyscraper. Imagine a dystopian metropolis like Akira's Neo Tokyo or Blade Runner's Los Angeles, but vertical. It's one of the most impressively dense, detailed settings I've encountered in a video game, and puts many other virtual cities—including Cyberpunk 2077's Night City—to shame.
In The Ascent you play as an indent: a migrant worker who travels to the Arcology from some distant planet, and has to work for the megacorp that runs it to pay off the cost of the ticket. However, this being a dark, dystopian future, the cost of the debt is so astronomical that it's highly unlikely it'll ever be paid off—which means this corporation, the Ascent Group, has a worker for life. It's a pretty raw deal, and you begin the game in the dingy bowels of the city performing a menial maintenance job in a place called the Deepstink. Not exactly the fresh start on a new world you were promised, but you have no choice.
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But as you progress through the story, your character rises to the top—quite literally—as they make a name for themselves and ascend from the industrial, overcrowded depths of the city to the gleaming Pinnacle, where the wealthiest citizens enjoy clean streets and blue skies. It's on this journey upwards where you experience the city's many varied districts, and the quality of developer Neon Giant's world-building becomes apparent. The sheer volume of evocative detail squeezed into every frame is mind-blowing: especially when you consider that it was all built by a small indie team of just a dozen people.
See some of the Arcology's most impressive sights in the video above.
One of the game's most visually striking moments comes when you reach the Highstreet district. After spending a good few hours in the lower levels—including the aforementioned Deepstink, a waste recycling plant, and a messy, claustrophobic residential district called Cluster 13—you emerge from an elevator and see the city in all its glory. The size of the place suddenly hits you as you find yourself gazing across an expanse of skyscrapers shrouded in mist, dazzling neon billboards, giant holograms, and swarms of flying vehicles. It's remarkable how an isometric game creates such a huge sense of scale.
Memorable locations include Coder's Cove, a maze-like hacker's den hidden in the flooded, abandoned Black Lake district, a casino built inside a giant gold Buddha statue, the Nitroad's ominous factories, and the aforementioned Pinnacle with its gleaming white streets, idyllic gardens, and glass floors looking down at the city below. Although the game is largely viewed from above, occasionally the developer likes to (rightly so) show off its environments and the camera swoops down to give you a more intimate look at your surroundings.
It's impressive on a grand scale, but holds up to scrutiny too. Every environment is obscene with small, painstaking details and clutter, making the city feel like a convincing, lived-in place. As you explore you see maintenance bots buzzing by, piles of trash, surfaces strewn with magazines, coffee mugs, and other junk, bars crammed with people, and glimpses through dirty windows of grimy apartments. In a lot of virtual cities you can imagine the artists carefully placing the buildings and props, but I never get that feeling from The Ascent. There's something wonderfully organic about how it's all constructed.
I also like how the city has a sci-fi twist, bringing something a little different to the well-worn cyberpunk genre. As much as it cribs (rather flagrantly) from dystopian fiction like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner, it also takes inspiration from the more unsavoury elements of the Star Wars universe. The Arcology is home to hundreds of thousands of beings from all over the galaxy, and on your journey you encounter a whole host of tough, scuzzy aliens who wouldn't look out of place in the Mos Eisley cantina. The Ascent rips off so many sci-fi movies, but has enough personality of its own to distract from how derivative it can be.
But the most surprising thing about the Arcology is that I found it to be a much more compelling setting than Cyberpunk's lavish Night City. The sense of place it creates is a lot more powerful, and the grubby, crowded, densely packed feel of the city makes Cyberpunk's metropolis feel weirdly sterile and lifeless in comparison. I just wish it was more of an RPG. The Arcology is really just an elaborate backdrop for an isometric shooter, and I was constantly wishing there was more to interact with, more stories to uncover, more people to meet, and deeper quests to get lost in. But hey, there's always The Ascent 2.
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