Ascendant: the early-access label GOG never took off

A day-one review griped about the very flaw a recent one still flags: the keyboard never learned to take orders.

A demigod against an army of rivals

You take on the skin of a demigod who breaks into a plane ruled by rivals bent on erasing you. Every run builds its map at random, and every death is final: the blessings, weapons and spells you've earned up to that point vanish with your body. There's no gentle restart — the dossier calls healing a rare thing, and the armies guarding each plane give no quarter.

Combat blends grounded and airborne combo strings with ranged bursts of magic, and a well-timed dodge settles a fight more than brute force does. GOG files the game under action and adventure, made and published by Hapa Games itself — and even with the launch on record for May 13, 2014, the store page still tags the title as early access.

The comparison players keep reaching on their own

Two people who played in the first years after launch land on the same comparison without ever comparing notes: Ascendant brings Binding of Isaac to mind, only settled with blade and spell instead of bombs. The formula recurs — rooms to clear, a boss at the end of each stretch, items that stack power until the run is over — and some call the result addictive, even as they admit how hard the going is. You recognize the same skeleton from room to room and come back anyway, because every run dangles a new spell or a blessing that reshapes the next fight. The dossier's most recent review, posted on September 13, 2025, still calls the game better than it expected from something free — the opposite of what the early-access label implies.

But even the people who recommend it run into the same wall: the keyboard won't take a full remap. The one who wrote on launch day, with about two hours on the clock, was already griping about being unable to move the controls around — which killed any chance of playing on a laptop, sitting on a train. A review from November 29, 2022 echoes the gripe: on a keyboard the keys get in the way of moving, and only an Xbox controller actually fixed it.

The same room, dealt out again

The people who didn't take to it point at the flip side of what the fans praise: the randomly generated rooms, they say, are identical in content and only shift position. You leave one room, step into the next and recognize the layout — same geometry, monsters in the same spots, only the orientation turns. One person reports quitting while still in the tutorial, about five minutes after opening the game, unable to pull off a jump and a dodge at once. Another shut it down the moment the first big monster showed up, put off by the choppy animation and a resolution that wouldn't fit the screen.

The harshest take calls the whole structure hollow punishment: dying costs nearly everything you've built, and the little that survives depends on grinding through corridor after corridor of the same room just to reach the items worth having. Even that review, though, grants one exception — the bosses, it says, have interesting mechanics — and closes by suggesting a full remake would sort the problem out. The complaint isn't a lack of ideas: it's execution that never matured, even after all this time up.

For those who'll lose it all again, and those who won't

Ascendant is for anyone who enjoys memorizing a boss's pattern and doesn't mind starting over from scratch with every death — that loop is what the most enthusiastic reviews rest on, from launch to the newest one in the dossier. It's not for anyone who needs remappable controls or progress that outlives death: that's exactly where the praise and the criticism meet, even after all this time on the store. If the tutorial stops you, you rarely come back — and the dossier shows that happening both close to launch and years on. The game promises a fresh world with every run; the people who walk away say it's always the same room, dealt out again.