This review contains spoilers
"Why end someone's misery when you can pull them out of it?"
That is a line I did not expect to experience in what I believed was a simple free runner devloped to test their 3D chops before they moved on to Hyper Light Breaker. I could not have been more wrong.
Solar Ash present itself as a surreal platformer that hosts excellent movement, a beautiful presentation and pretty compelling motivation. To save everyone. A task that is revealed to be impossible and the real solution to the damage...is just to move on.
The movement is just fantastic. skating across clouds on railings and up bosses. It looks great and feels even better. The soundtrack compliments everything perfectly and it all just comes together in a really wonderful way.
I will admit early on I saw the game and it's repetitive structure as more style over substance. But with every region that I entered and the more dialogue that I heard, the more I fell in love.
Solar Ash is a true Heart Machine classic.
That is a line I did not expect to experience in what I believed was a simple free runner devloped to test their 3D chops before they moved on to Hyper Light Breaker. I could not have been more wrong.
Solar Ash present itself as a surreal platformer that hosts excellent movement, a beautiful presentation and pretty compelling motivation. To save everyone. A task that is revealed to be impossible and the real solution to the damage...is just to move on.
The movement is just fantastic. skating across clouds on railings and up bosses. It looks great and feels even better. The soundtrack compliments everything perfectly and it all just comes together in a really wonderful way.
I will admit early on I saw the game and it's repetitive structure as more style over substance. But with every region that I entered and the more dialogue that I heard, the more I fell in love.
Solar Ash is a true Heart Machine classic.
A great start but a game that left me colder than I would have expected on finishing. The movement mechanics are fun and I actually enjoyed the boss encounters that seem to have been divisive on here, but it feels like the game is missing a layer of complexity that would take the movement focused gameplay to the next level.
Visually it's got an incredible aesthetic and the ambient music is good as well but god why is the boss music so sleepy? If you were going to rip so much from Shadow of the Colossus you'd think getting this bit right would be a high priority, instead the encounters feel somewhat anticlimactic despite the scale and presentation otherwise being so grand.
The story... honestly these characters did absolutely nothing for me and I didn't really find anything to get invested in. Shame as so much of this I really liked, but that ending fails to resonate so bad that it really got me thinking about the ways the experience was unfortunately flat.
Visually it's got an incredible aesthetic and the ambient music is good as well but god why is the boss music so sleepy? If you were going to rip so much from Shadow of the Colossus you'd think getting this bit right would be a high priority, instead the encounters feel somewhat anticlimactic despite the scale and presentation otherwise being so grand.
The story... honestly these characters did absolutely nothing for me and I didn't really find anything to get invested in. Shame as so much of this I really liked, but that ending fails to resonate so bad that it really got me thinking about the ways the experience was unfortunately flat.