Indie Game of the Week 403: Solar Ash

If there's one thing I can say about Januaries it's that they often feel like a giant black hole, from which nothing—not even light—can escape. Just a gaping void in the game release schedule as you huddle under a blanket for warmth and wait out the cold (or very hot, in certain parts of the world) weather to pass. It's in that saturnine atmosphere that I find myself playing Solar Ash, the most recent game from Heart Machine (well, sorta: their successor to their first game Hyper Light Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker, just went into early access). Its story follows Rei, a "Voidrunner" kitted out with some high-tech gear suited for black hole exploration in order to collapse the Ultravoid: an enormous ambulatory black hole that has been swallowing up planets one after the other, with Rei's own world being the next course for this Galactus wannabe. Technical problems means she's separated from her team, with a fractured voidsuit and a malfunctioning AI (when are they ever not) just about keeping her, and her mission, intact.

As with HLD the setting and style are immediately captivating with their combinations of neon and earth tones as you explore a broken world filled with remnants of both the former civilization and the apocalypse that ended it. The departure here is that Solar Ash is a fully 3D open-world sort of game that has you quickly skating around looking for "anomalies"—ominous purple eyes surrounded by gunk that requires a careful multi-stage extraction process to remove—to dissolve in order to take on the titanic "remnant" boss of that area futzing with the electronics and important computational work being performed by said AI. Each zone typically follows the same pattern: get the AI, Cyd, back online; use the coordinates it gives you to scan for anomalies in the surrounding environment; eliminate them all one by one; then defeat the remnant. Most of the game is built around its traversal, between skating across large (and mostly empty) swathes of goopish blue ocean and the rocky remains of planets floating in the void, jumping or grappling or rail-grinding up to the anomalies, and completing fast-paced sequences where you must destroy a row of targets quickly to take out the anomaly's core and eliminate it. The bosses use the same sort of sequences too, though much longer and more challenging.

The game also has its fair share of discoveries, though it's not as replete in collectibles as you might expect from a world of its size. The first type involves figuring out what happened to the rest of the Voidrunner team: you find audio logs they produced in their travels, each of which additionally includes a piece of an alternative suit that not only changes Rei's appearance but also confers some sort of vital boon. For instance, the affable mechanic Ghozam leaves behind a suit that doubles all your attack damage, handy for eliminating the void monsters that congregate around anomalies. The other are journal entries left behind by a member of the cat-like alien race of the Veruki, their planet being a previous victim of the Ultravoid, who helps fill in more of the background and the mysteries behind this uncanny realm filled with the detritus of a thousand destroyed worlds. Of course, any gravitas offered by this guy's accounts is immediately evaporated by how he gravely signs off with his own name—Tarragon Danderpaws—with every missive like they were letters sent home from the Civil War front line. In fact, the game has something of a less-than-serious gallows humor aspect throughout: one side-quest chain involves helping a pompous but empathetic lobster alien admiral locate his missing crew, each of which fell afoul of essentially their own stupidity. Though that quest line ends on a downer note, there's something darkly funny about finding an away team that took a dip in hot springs that had clearly become acidic to an immediately fatal degree.

Following an emerging pattern with Heart Machine, Solar Ash is a game I wanted to like more than I actually did. It is overall an improvement to HLD, and I'm not just saying that as a 3D platformer fan first and a Zeldersatz fan second, but so much of this game is slowly (in the sense that everything is so far apart; you move pretty quickly) getting from one area to the next through mostly empty spaces completing a handful of platforming challenges and repeating that process on loop. The combat isn't great, though it's fortunately not the focus either, with enemies being vicious and having inscrutably wide attack hitboxes (though you do as well, to keep things fair) and giving you no reason to remove them besides that they're occasionally in the way. For instance, the guys that hang out on walls firing laser beams at you should probably be dealt with tout de suite but the little spider goobers roaming around most areas of the game are best left alone. It's not like you gain anything from defeating them after all. The bosses and their Shadow of the Colossus style appearances and combat strategies—make your way up to the one weak point it has—are definitely cool-looking but having to complete sequences of up to 20 steps or more, and having to start the entire chain over if you're a little late or missed any indicator where the next target in the chain was, made them more frustrating to deal with than anything else.

The worldbuilding, visual style, and the flow of the traversal once again save the day here so I can't say it didn't have its highlights. One thing I did like is that you're effectively feuding with the soul of the Ultravoid (or something; the game's kind of cagey about it) and so after every boss you actually end up losing permanent health (which can be recovered, at least) after said soul smushes you in her hand: a distinct turnaround from how most Zelda bosses tend to reward you. It gives you plenty to do in its svelte 8-10 hour runtime and finds an adequate balance between platforming challenges that purely rely on skill and those that might take a little more exploration and thinking things through to find the way to proceed. It of course loses points for insisting on both a speedrun and a highest difficulty mode completion achievement, which is at least two extra playthroughs (as you can't play on the hardest mode in your first run: that would just be ridiculous) which is the kind of achievement-based terrorism I had hoped we'd moved past as a society. By the metrics that matter, though, Solar Ash can be a great deal of fun when you're in its flow and just taking in those extraordinary sights, so despite my usual Heart Machine bugbears I can't really argue that Solar Ash isn't worth a look (especially not while it's still free on Game Pass).

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Bonus Video

Gonna try to keep including these in IGotWs, at least when I deem it necessary for mechanic or gamefeel reasons. After all, sometimes a video clip is worth a thousand words. More, if you consider the file size.

Here's just a brief clip of how quick the platforming tends to be:

I was going to show you a boss fight, since it's mostly the same sort of quick bouncing from thing to thing, but it felt kinda spoilerish. Can never go wrong with too many Ratchet & Clank rails in my opinion.