The good news about trying out Solar Ash is that it clicked immediately since it was not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeves: you’ve got skating mechanics inspired by Jet Set Radio, boss fights and designs inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, and a woozy ambient soundtrack alongside gooey and ethereal aesthetics captured in deep space. It’s not hard to decipher Heart Machine’s vision for the game. The bad news about trying out Solar Ash is that being so heavily inspired by two of my favorite games meant that I was both consciously and unconsciously comparing the game in every waking moment of my playthrough, and the cracks in the armor really started to show. Right away, the most obvious issue is the lack of subtlety. The game is so in-your-face with its lore and the overarching details that it fails to leave much room for individual player interpretation. The protagonist Rei is constantly commenting upon everything she comes across, and the audio logs that she stumbles upon where her old crewmates vividly describe the world’s demise don’t leave much up to imagination either. This over-explanation is further compounded by all the jargon thrown into the mix and the exaggerated voice acting, which not only confuses me, but also feels like the authors didn’t really tackle the tone properly; instead of sounding desperate, Rei instead comes off as somewhat angsty to me. The amount of effort put into flaunting all this detail feels quite unwarranted, considering that Shadow of the Colossus was more than happy to let players just linger in their own space and judge for themselves: what happened to “show, don’t tell” guys?

Further invited comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus make it evident to me that despite the reverence of its boss encounters, Solar Ash fails to emulate much of their appeal in any meaningful way. Nothing comes close to the volume swells present in Shadow of the Colossus, because there’s no focused build-up of anticipation when the player is too busy looking for plasma and voidrunner caches alongside traversal puzzles for destroying Anomalies, not to mention Rei’s stream of self-narration breaking up any prolonged moments of silence. More importantly, the boss fights themselves lack any stakes. Shadow of the Colossus emphasizes its sense of scale, as you carefully climb this larger-than-life creature while it desperately flails about, trying to shake you off before you snuff it out by plunging your sword into its vitals. Solar Ash on the other hand, may as well just be a casual Sunday drive through a Mario Kart course; the sigils have been replaced with temporary targets and context-sensitive grapple points, and most of the interaction boils down to holding forward on the joystick and jumping/grappling at the right time. You don’t even need to adjust the camera, because the game will automatically do that for you when you need to shift directions. Say what you want about Shadow of the Colossus’ ballistic camera during the colossi encounters, but it really lent the fights a sense of powerlessness and urgency during this desperate dance of death that Solar Ash lacks. To top this all off, consequences of failure are minimized in the latter; falling off or failing to hit a target in time just sends you back to a close checkpoint to the boss with only one hit point missing, and you can usually grapple right back on the boss to retry the phase within a minute or two. Considering that health boxes are scattered everywhere, you have to actively try to get a game over. It is kind of funny that the final boss fight doesn’t even provide you with a health bar for a potential game over: it’s a mere formality at that point.

The weird thing is, despite how streamlined the boss fights are in Solar Ash, there’s a real lack of polish from strange jank and design decisions elsewhere. Rei’s standard attack combo string consists of three attacks at a time, but the game likes throwing enemy variations at you that require four hits at a time (either a pair of smaller foes that each take two hits, or a singular medium baddy that takes four hits). The result is that you have to actively linger in the same space to completely finish off most enemies, and combat then noticeably interferes with the general flow of movement. Regarding lack of fluidity, I also have to agree with nex3’s point that it’s surprisingly easy to lose momentum altogether from strange collisions due to geometry. The strange momentum physics are reflected elsewhere too, such as when I noticed that jumping from the end of a rail resulted in significantly less momentum conserved than when Rei naturally slid off the rail instead. Finally, it’s kind of a shame that despite how much plasma is thrown at you and emphasized as the main collectible resource (to the point where one of the unlockable suits doubles your rate of plasma collection), there’s only one use for it: restoring a block of your health gauge’s max capacity after losing a cell every time you defeat a boss. In that sense, plasma feels rather superfluous, much like most of the game’s mechanics and features outside of its core traversal.

In spite of all this, I liked Solar Ash enough to complete a save file. I can’t help but feel bummed though, because I should have loved this. I had a good enough time just gliding about the surface of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and zooming about from rail to rail, but there’s so much stuff in-between that doesn’t seem to add anything pertinent to the base structure. I can’t see myself coming back to this for hardcore mode unfortunately, since it just seems like an artificially difficult no-hit playthrough with extra steps, though perhaps I’ll return someday to see if a speedrun challenge feels any better than a standard run. I find myself agreeing with quite a few others here: if practically everything minus the atmospheric visuals/soundtrack and core traversal mechanics were removed, you might actually have one of the most compact yet focused experiences of recent times. As it is now though? It’s just fine. It’ll always be I suppose.

Heart Machine. Their first game: a breakout indie hit, a breath of fresh air. A game that tells its story without dialogue and one that would earn them a fanbase that would punish them for not making more of the same, as Solar Ash was met with the same response Hyper Light Breakers received on reveal: why isn't this Hyper Light Drifter?

And it's a pity. Solar Ash is a technicolor pastiche, a marvelous bit of tech. Fast, freeflowing, with environments that loop and curl in on themselves, wrapping around seas of clouds and spanning the crumbling remains of worlds. Movement is graceful and intuitive, boss fights are elegant and refined. Your character is all but defined by their freedom to traverse the world of Solar Ash, just as they are bound by its narrative.

But that's the rub. Unlike its predecessor, Solar Ash is written, with actual words and voices to go with them. So, does it earn this departure? Absolutely. The tone is impeccable, relentless, the core theme woven throughout every moment of the game. The voice actors do an incredible job of rising to the challenge, delivering emotional, powerful dialogue, creating very real, very believable characters.

That believability, the emotional resonance inherent in the writing and its delivery, is Solar Ash's greatest strength. It is a game that is, inexorably, about endings and what we do when we are faced with them. For that to work, in a game where the plot itself is thin on the ground, the characters have to be painfully, cripplingly believable. Solar Ash is a fragmented world, filled with fragments of people, in turn bearing fragments of ourselves. A powerful statement, and a reminder that Heart Machine has greater things in store.

It's alright. Unfortunately not as great as I was expecting. Core movement is solid but feels like it needs more, as you only really have a dash and a jump. I kept hoping I'd unlock more moves, or reach areas with a greater focus on building speed down slopes, but it never really happened. Maybe I'll watch a speedrun and realise I was missing out on some fun movement tech.

Early levels are way too basic and boring, but the later ones start getting more interesting, thanks to their smaller platforms, more frequent hazards, and funky gravity manipulation. The "bosses" are thankfully just more intense platforming, which I greatly approve of, but they still feel too simple.

Combat is just plain bad, and I started skipping through all narrative elements pretty quickly, which I don't do in most games. The main character is cursed with obnoxious game protagonist dialogue - "huh, I wonder what's over there. Better check it out..." That kind of stuff. It sucks, and I wasn't really interested in sitting through long conversations and audio logs to learn more about the world. Outer Wilds this ain't.

Again, it's alright. Oddly similar to Sonic Frontiers, but still better in every way.

The music is other worldly, the world surreal, the art is stunning and the movement system is absolutely brilliant. Solar Ash combines elements similar to that of Jet Set Radio Future, Shadow of The Colossus, Sonic games and Journey/Sky for a wonderful, yet flawed experience, never reaching the same highs as games of it's ilk.

An impressive achievement in a lot of ways, specially considering it's Heart Machine's first 3D game. But to me this feels like one of those games that almost could have become a masterpiece by just removing stuff.

And by stuff I mean a lot of the voice acting. It doesn't feel like it fits the game world you're actually looking at. With voice acting in this way, the world is realized in a higher resolution and with that comes a lot of expectations. Expectations that would be better off elegantly avoided as in Heart Machine's other work. Expectations that if not met to some degree, ends up making for a dissonant whole. The idea of the story is good on paper but it ends up stretched out too much with not enough to say. Almost like they were making two different types of games and pasting the one over the other. The execution is off and the game as a whole suffers. It feels like the same points are made over and over with no surprise or momentum. It's too late to save this, it's too late to save that, etc.

I would have loved Solar Ash to embrace more subtraction/abstraction and leave more to mystery. Like in a Bloodborne, like a Journey, like a Fez or like a Hyper Light Drifter.

Solar Ash clearly takes inspiration from the "Soulsborne" games in how they approach NPCs and story, but it feels like they miss the important parts that makes the formula work. In games like Bloodborne, it's easy to be intrigued and start investigating the mystery of the world, and you'll find yourself fawning over every word spoken in cutscenes or by NPCs, becoming another piece of the puzzle. In Solar Ash, there is no mystery, every "thing the game is about" is spelled out to you, not once, not twice but countless times. I end up perplexed by the decision to approach the story of this world in this way. Even something as drastic as removing all voice acting (or even every single word in every shape) from the game I feel would make for a more coherent work of art.

Despite all the criticisms I have, I can't help absolutely loving this game, which might seem strange. But within Solar Ash a masterpiece is hidden somewhere. I can't wait to see what they learned from this and watch them put it into Hyper Light Breaker.

I've had Solar Ash sitting here installed on my xbox for probably... 2 years? Even though I liked the look of it, I didn't feel motivated to play it, as it's a sequel (? prequel?) to Hyper Light Drifter. I also liked the look of HLD, but it was an absolute snooze to play... And yet I was idly sifting through my installed games, saw this, and looked it up on HowLongToBeat. Yes, I'll play a 6 hour game!

If I had known that this was essentially Shadow of the Colossus + Outer Wilds + Rail grinding, I wouldn't have taken this long to try it. That's a recipe for Larry bait! You put that shit under a cardboard box being held up by a stick, and I'm gonna be trapped within 20 seconds!

The gameplay loop is pretty simple: You wander around little hubs, destroying goop by hitting weak points in quick succession, and each one killed reveals a weak point on a big monster roaming around the area. Once you've killed all the goops, you can kill the colossus. You grapple onto them and do the same thing, hitting the designated spots on the way to their main weak point, and if you're too slow you have to restart. On occasion this can be frustrating, mostly due to the camera whipping around like a maniac while zoomed out about 400 miles away from your character. It usually works fine. You don't have much wiggle room in most cases, but there's no real penalty for getting knocked off, as areas are full of health pickups. There are also small enemies scattered around, which are never more than minor annoyances. This is fine, I guess, as it avoids the Prince of Persia Problem™ for the most part.

A really weird mechanic that I don't quite understand is how you pick up Plasma throughout the game, which is used to increase your max health. Your max health also decreases by 1 every time you beat a colossus, for story reasons. By the halfway point, I had a huge stock of plasma so after every boss I just had to top up to max health again. It's kinda just strange busywork, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. It would make sense if you could use the plasma to upgrade other abilities or something, but nah, just max health. Alright.

Anyway, if you're doing to do a riff on SotC it's important to nail the Vibes. Solar Ash got it. While it doesn't feature the same desperate loneliness and total lack of anything approaching humanity as SotC, it's much more similar to a Souls game. Your character is part of a crew that was sent to collapse a black hole that's threatening a nearby planet, and everyone here is either dead or insane. Interactions with NPCs range from tragic to darkly comic, but all of them are pitiable in their own ways. The end "twist" can be seen coming from about... 5 minutes into the game, but who cares, it all looks cool.

8/10

I would say that this has me looking forward to Hyper Light Breaker, but upon further research I have found that it is apparently going to be a roguelike. So, uh... I'll always have Solar Ash.

Não tenho palavras pra descrever o que eu acabei de jogar.

Pra mim isso aqui é pura perfeição em jogo, as cores, os detalhes, as mecânicas de jogabilidade e a história, tudo é perfeito nesse jogo.

Agora eu entendo o porque de a Annapurna ser tão amada por todos, Solar ash resgatou em mim uma coisa que andei esquecendo a muito tempo, ter calma para jogar e apreciar cada momento da obra.

Eu não posso dizer muito da história se não eu taria dando um spoiler danado aqui, mas o que posso afirmar é que não tem como não gostar dela e a forma que a mesma é contada. Diferente de alguns jogos indies que te jogam no mundo sem saber o que ta rolando e deixa tu por ali assim mesmo sem contar nada, Solar Ash pega na tua mão e te ensina a caminhar lentamente entre as letras desse livro, mas não só caminhar, também aprender sobre cada frase que as letras formam, o que quero dizer é que ele ensina muito bem sobre a história dele e traz conceitos filosóficos interessantes que combinam total com a atmosfera que é implantada nele.

E a trilha sonora.. ahh a trilha sonora eu não posso deixar de citar, todos os momentos bons se tornaram melhores ainda por conta dela, NÃO JOGUE solar ash sem ouvir a trilha sonora, ela é muito boa e da sentimentos de alegria, tristeza e confusão de acordo com o cenário.

Enfim, melhor jogo indie que já joguei esse ano por enquanto TRANQUILAMENTE, um jogo com a dificuldade suave, sem complicações e sem estresse nenhum, só alegria.

Solar Ash initially caught my eye with its cover art, and reeled me in when I learned it was by the same developers as Hyper Light Drifter (a game I’ve yet to play myself but have heard good things about). Seeing as it was on Xbox Game Pass I had no reason not to try it out and from an audio/visual aspects alone, it delivered. I love how the game looks and sounds. The gameplay however took a bit more for me to really come to grips with. This game is more of a puzzle platformer than action game, and I am relatively bad at the genre. This meant early on I failed at a lot of the easier puzzles (like really easy). What I liked however, was that the game will give you a task that is unachievable unless you learn certain mechanics of the game. For example, a boss fight where no matter what I did I couldn’t make it to the next spike (the spots you have to hit to fight the boss). I was forced to do something I hadn’t really felt the need to do before; I dashed to build up enough initial speed. While it seems simple enough (really should have been doing it earlier), I had no reason to do this prior so I simply... hadn’t. Same with using the slowing down time mechanic. It can extend your grapple range, allowing you to draw closer to monsters and grapple points. While yes, it's obvious this would simply be useful, I was instead just running forward and hacking away. It wasn’t until I HAD to grapple enemies to effectively kill them (high up enemies shooting projectiles), that I started to truly add it to my kit. It's these kinds of lessons, explained and then immediately being required that made me start to enjoy this game from a gameplay perspective as well.

The main objective of this game is to clear a series of mini platforming puzzles to unlock the boss, and then defeat the boss to unlock the next area. Usually these mini puzzles are designed to familiarize yourself enough with the mechanics that will soon be required to fight the boss. I appreciate that instead a wall of text telling me what to do, I had to instead realize what wasn't working and then change my gameplay. (As an aside, skating on top of giant creatures while it squirms around just felt insanely cool. The way the music changes when the boss is about to be defeated coupled with the spectacle of riding up them lead to an incredibly memorable experience).

There are also several side objectives, one of which offers a reward and the end and the other seemingly just for story reasons. The former offers a new suit as a reward, which will give perks such as letting you slow down time more frequently, letting you acquire more plasma (the games currency) and letting you have less cooldown on your dash to name a few. While none are necessary to progress the game, I found they added enough draw to make me fully explore the nooks of the map which in turn, progressed the more narrative driven side content as well.

One criticism I have in this game is the characters and writing not being strong enough for me to care about anyone/thing going on. In particular a man in the Mushroom region and these journals you can find on the ground completely had my eyes glazing over upon reading/listening to them.

Another gripe I had was that the game doesn’t control as nicely as I’d want it to, especially when it rips control of the camera out of my hands. While the only particularly egregious example was when it forced me to do one of the mini platforming puzzles at a static far away angle, frequently during boss encounters your camera gets forcibly tugged in a direction the game wants you to head, but counter to what was intended I’d frequently get disoriented and fall off, leading me to have to restart that particular encounter. Nothing too bad, maybe got genuinely annoyed at the game 3 times in its entire runtime.

The real worst aspect of this game is its combat. It feels awful, I felt that I was forced to take trade damage with the enemies I was fighting at times, and I think the game knew this would happen due to the insane amounts of health packs they have littered around the place. There isn’t really much to it other than walking into said monster and whacking it a few times. The issue stems from how bad whacking things feels. You can hit a monster twice then need a cooldown, and can also slow down time to close the distance. I however felt that doing the attacks left me always open to being hit due to the awkward dodging mechanics, and that the range of your tether grab move was never long enough to be truly as useful as I think the developers were hoping. I wonder if the range was nerfed in the hopes to not use monsters to skip parts of the platforming but that's just speculation. I think the game would have been significantly more enjoyable if I could platform in peace.

Overall I’d recommend this game if it was heavily on sale, or if you can play it on game pass such as I did. The beautiful visuals alone were what kept me invested, as well as a few really amazing tracks of music. Give it a whirl.

I enjoyed so many pieces of Solar Ash.

The movement feels great, it has an interesting premise, and everything about it looks beautiful. Hell, I spent almost half the game not realizing there was a boost button (no idea how I missed that in the tutorial) and it was still really fun just idly skating around, finding caches, and playing "Connect-the-Dots of the Colossus" every hour or so. But beyond that admittedly impressive surface lies a game that's disappointingly hollow.

There are brief excellent moments when you arrive at new locations or when you reach scenic overlooks and the camera pulls back to let you savor a gorgeous unworldly vista. Apart from those moments, however, Solar Ash does little to stand out of the crowd. It's never bad but it rarely excels either. My save file is just short of 6 hours playtime and that feels about how long I would want this game to be, given how shallow your interactions with the world are. The game does very little to iterate on its initial traversal or combat, so I'm sure the last couples hours of this game could feel like a slog for some.

Solar Ash is good not great which is a bummer coming from Heart Machine. Announcing your studio with an exceptional, challenging, and down-right eerie isometric action-adventure only to make a pretty good 3D platformer is a letdown, and it leaves me hoping that Hyper Light Breaker is a return to form rather than a continuation of the trend.

On paper, this had everything it needed to be a breezy time carried by its gorgeous art design, smooth skating mechanics and a fairly contained and manageable scope. It can be fun to quickly go from place to place and play around with gravity whenever it comes up, but it's held back by unnecessary creative decisions. The annoying/confused voice direction doesn't keep much interest over a played-out narrative, and the general lack of variety/mood escalation really drag it down.

There's slight variety as far as the size and shape of the not-Colossi at the end of each zone, but the approach and method in fighting them never changes between hitting the little needles on their backs. It's great for conveying the scope in conjunction with the art design, but only does so much to remain interesting when repeated six times. The music also fails to convey a distinct mood for each one; the game's soundtrack is pretty soothing synthwave for a lot of it that fits the vibe and gets slightly more intense at a boss but lacks emotional tone to make any key moments stand out. The game even denies you the satisfaction of toppling a boss by instantly blasting you into the mind dimension every time one is defeated. Doing this wouldn't interfere with the theoretically somber tone, as Shadow of the Colossus forced you to see the weight of your final strike as each beast fell; Solar Ash feels like it just wants to move on.

There are some good ideas I'd hope to see Sonic pick up in the future, a particularly good one being using the colored plants to open doors and rail-lines before time runs out or managing the platforms around radiation pools to avoid dying from too much exposure, but even with its pretty environments there's not much to break up the gameplay formula being repeated six and a half times over.

Lastly there's the storytelling. For some reason even though the art direction would suggest the world's design itself can carry the narrative like the Ori duology, there's pretty constant chatter from the main character Rei, who is directed to sound angrier and more resigned than desperate as the narrative wants her to seem. Her relation to Cyd was adequately done if a bit detached, but the side characters you run into or hear logs from feel like they were from a different game entirely. There's a quirky, almost cartoony way of speaking that feels at odds with this game stylistically in a way that seems uncanny. Characters like the captain and his various crews with their acting wouldn't be out of place in a kids network comedy show.

I was thinking of ways to convey a lot of the game's story ideas and other indie games already showed me better ways of accomplishing each element of its narrative delivery. If the game was more like Furi, where your protagonist's only verb of communication was their core gameplay (in that case, combat, in this case, moving) in contrast with everyone around them, that would've conveyed a more thorough emotional tone. I dogged on Neon White for its writing, but it was at least wholly separated from its slick game feel and did actually convey interesting storytelling through character-based stages while Rei's unnecessary chirping is in conjunction with playing. There are also audio logs, which felt much more interesting in a game like Outer Wilds because they were slowly unraveling a vast mystery with a lot of turns which worked alongside what the main character was doing in slowly exploring a galaxy. Here, on top of the tonal issue you can't even listen to them while running despite them being baked into the world, which feels like an oversight for the focus on constant flow.

Solar Ash had plenty of potential to convey a strong feeling and a generally swift game feel that carries it through its brief runtime, but it just came off as distracting and at odds with itself. I wish it embraced its strong stylistic elements and speed more than it does.

An ambitious, janky, beautiful, frustrating game. When the movement works, it feels marvelous, gliding through levels with a gripping sense of momentum, pausing time and cracking heads as you go. But you can lose that momentum just by hitting a corner of geometry wrong, and the game stumbles in similar ways. Enemies quickly become a matter of just trying to guess when you're in the radius that a grapple autokill will work, and exploration turns into trying to figure out mapless exactly which cloudy enclave you might have left unviewed.

The bosses are the worst part by far. They ask the player to navigate between waypoints at a breakneck pace, which could be exciting if it were less repetitive and failures felt earned. But instead, any hiccup of geometry dooms a run and pushes the player out to scavenge up another shield box and try again.

Looks and sounds pretty rad, and the skating is great (when the camera isn't flipping around and killing your momentum), but following a trail of breadcrumbs while the main character simultaneously patronises themselves and you is just not my idea of fun :/

Also the combat is completely unnecessary, wish they'd been brave enough to strip it out completely.

Also also tiny text and no resize option.

Okay I'm done.

After completing it: Yeah, this is an all-time favorite.

Feels like a grab-bag of games I really love: Shadow of the Colossus, JSRF, Sonic Adventure 2, Prince of Persia Sands of Time (no joke), and Outer Wilds. Surprisingly, its highs are as high and sometimes moreso than those games. However, it does falls a little short of Sonic Adventure 2, but you can't ding a painting because it isn't the Mona Lisa.

Momentum is just such a fun thing to experience in video games, and skating around such beautifully varied environments is basically just asking me to give your game a near 5 stars. I was consistently just so overjoyed with the new ways they found to create challenges for the mechanics, as skating, grinding, climbing and jumping are all you do in this game. There is NEVER any stupid ass gimmick to detract from what is such a solid foundation. There is one section that involves grappling and grinding to get to a ship in the sky and my god, it is so fun. There are so many moments throughout this game that I am going to think back on and go; "Damn, that was really fucking fun!" Which, to me, is the litmus test for a good game.

The sheer fantastic delight on display here reminds me of playing Spyro the Dragon as a kid, interestingly enough. The sheer amount of color and whimsy is such a visual treat, and make no mistake, this game is an artistic triumph. The fact this thing was sent out to die on the Epic Games Store is an Art Crime because no one fucking played it because of that. I have nothing but respect for how difficult this game looks like it was to make. No game is easy to make, but this game in particular is so well-made and functions so tight that I'm stunned by how SHORT the credits were, how SMALL this team was for how ambitious this game is.

One thing that struck me was that I 100% completed it my first run through. That isn't me saying that I have the game mastered due to my Gamer Instinct, that is more a testament to really good level design and FOCUSED design that meant I always knew what I was looking for, where to find it, and how to get to it. By keeping the systems so simple, there was never an overwhelming amount of shit to look for, it always came naturally. Also the amount of times I would just explore random stuff that had no benefit proves a truth that Super Mario 64 got and no one else did: gamers will explore for its own sake if exploring is fun. If playing the game and moving around the game world is fun, I don't care if I find something useful.

The boss fights are also really something special. The game is obviously drawing a lot from SoTC, which it makes no secret of, but the way you interact with the bosses here is much different, it gives the game a very one of a kind playstyle. You skate around the bosses, timing jumps and hits almost like a rhythm game, with each variation becoming more challenging and requiring more precise timing. I don't think any of the fights can match Shadow of the Colossus's finest moments, HeartMachine does a really great job giving Solar Ash's bosses an identity all their own.

That identity is why it is such a bummer that it is trying to remind you SO MUCH of Shadow of the Colossus. It feels like a very insecure game in that regard, that it doesn't think it can stand on its own so it needs to evoke SoTC in almost every regard. The ALMOST here being that SoTC was a very quiet game, that had very little voice acting, and let its gorgeous visuals do a lot of the talking.

Solar Ash almost has this, but for some GODFORSAKEN reason they have elected to have Rei not SHUT UP EVER. I find the voice acting completely out-of-place too: a made-up language would be fine, but having a very graceful and divine looking being like Rei speak like she is ringing me up at the record store is just a total mismatch. Turn the voices off if you want to be able to get into the alien-nature of this world, as the writer's are trying to sabotage it with every fucking quip. There is so much writing in this game, and the writers were not in their bag for much of it. The lore is not well-explained, over-written and too dense to be interesting, the whole "protagonist is actually doing something bad" angle is so foreshadowed that it actually felt like a joke at a certain point. The game was inspired by SoTC, of course the protagonist is doing something bad. I would be lying if I said that some of this didn't actually work though. I started to grow fond of Rei and CYD, the twist was actually fairly well done and the final fight has some good groundwork laid for it narratively that I'm not opposed to its rather hokey nature. I have no idea who the writers are, and they ARE hacks, but they're at least creative hacks.

I would love for HeartMachine to make another game like this, as this gameplay loop is something I am absolutely crazy about, I just want them to be more confident in their game, and not feel this aching need to remind me of a completely different title. Solar Ash is a beautifully made game and it IS one-of-a-kind. If only people actually knew it came out!!

My God This Game Never Shuts Da Hell Up!!!

An absolutely gorgeous looking feast for the eyes, with the camera panning to showcase some truly wondrous vistas. I'm not entirely surprised this thing is beautiful, as Hyper Light Drifter somehow had great looking vistas in pixel art. This team just makes games that look awesome.

What is a surprise is how fucking wordy this game is, as Hyper Light Drifter has NO words. Maybe they felt they needed to compensate by writing three million words, but if you like a ton of boring lore in a go-nowhere story, they have covered their bases!! Also if you want my professional opinion: shut the voices OFF. the voice acting isn't bad, it's just completely inappropriate in a game like this. I think a made-up language like what's in Gravity Rush or Shadow of the Colossus would be much more fitting, and maybe have Rei not QUIP ALL THE TIME and we can make it work. But this is a way too verbose game that tells so much story visually that you have to wonder if this was just them capitulating to someone. That someone barged into the development studio with a AAA game and said, "See, the protagonist comments on everything, you need this in your game."

Also combat mechanics. I have given up my battle against combat mechanics. I am going to have to interrupt my platforming to press square 4 times in front of a generic monster for the rest of my life.

This game is so enjoyable though. I love the boss fights, I love the flow of the game, I cannot believe a smaller indie studio could make something that feels so good to play. I've seen people complaining about the price tag (40 bucks) but this game looks like it was a massive pain in the ass to program so if they want to charge that much for their work they fucking should.

A principle of Mindfullness is the concept that we cannot cure what has happened to us, we can only learn to heal from our past, and move onward.

SOLAR ASH packs a pretty predictable yet emotionally satisfying story of desperation and forgiveness into a fast paced 3D platformer. A story of slowly learning to heal. The movement mechanics are wonderful from the get go, each system building until you're speeding up the torso's of giant monsters, navigating the SUPER MARIO GALAXY-esque gravity system to pull off perfect attack chains.

When you're on the games wavelength, you truly can get lost in the experience. However, there are a handful of hiccups that break immersion. You'll inevitably hit a point where the speed and precision you're attempting to pull off will push the game engine too far. I got knocked into the interior of a building model while fighting some enemies and had to reset to get out. It's still respectable that the game pulls off so many unique layers at once. Probably could've had more enemy variety (once you hit the second section of the map you've seen all the baddie varieties).

A short but spectacular little adventure that will hook you with its traversal mechanics, and should keep you engaged through its uplifting finale. A real hidden gem.

Solar Ash is an odd game, it has the good foundations of a pretty decent (albeit cliche) story and some decent level design and unique area-to-area mechanics, along with some (while repetitive) pretty visually engaging boss fights. However, it doesn't really put Heart Machine on an upward momentum following their preceding title Hyper Light Drifter.

Solar Ash does a few things well, the first and most apparent being the design and visuals. The game is quite pretty and really tries to make some very fun areas that really make me take a step back and just appreciate them, which succeeds a majority of the time. The bosses were also a highlight (in some ways) as they were always great cornerstones of each area, minus probably the final boss of the game.

Solar Ash fails for me in two other very critical areas however, story and gameplay. This game is plagued by a story that, while dark, seems to try to encompass to many light tones to really let me get immersed into the world. I'm not talking Marvel Movie cutting-the-tension bad, but it definitely distracts when Rei is having a great time hopping around to finding something horrific and going "oh no!", it's just really jarring. It works, but it really lessens the impact of the ending and the realization-moments (that were incredibly predictable) that this game drops throughout. The ending is also okay, but has an incredibly bad ending boss that just wasn't it chief.

The gameplay is probably the worst for me. I want to start by making clear I am not a 3D platformer-player, but I have played many (including Odyssey, Galaxy, Pseudoragalia, etc) and Solar Ash's momentum-based movement just really doesn't work for some of the near-perfect maneuvers needing to be made to do some timed puzzles, and it does get a little frustrating at times when it takes 5-6 attempts of a puzzle just to figure out what the game want's me to do. The combat is also loose and not amazing feeling either, and being the bosses are literally "hit thing, parkour, hit thing" it gets really frustrating really quick.

Overall, it's fun on a sale if you need a brainless, short game that really doesn't take too much thought, but Heart Machine has done better and I'm sure they will continue doing so. Overall, it's just fine, but nothing special.

Solar Ash is built on a strong mechanical foundation, but lacks depth - both in gameplay and narrative.

The story is Not That Good, and I found myself watching apathetically through each narrative beat. (Admittedly: there is one scene near the very end of the game that had me turning to my partner and exclaiming "Woah!! That was SICK!! That was hardcore!!")

A decent game overall, but very dissapointing when compared to Heart Machine's previous work.

Solar ash is a weird one to describe, it's a bunch of genres into one, but for the most part it provides you with a the felling of freedom while jumping around it's gorgeous worlds, for me it's like you picking up a 3d platformer, merging it with a game like the pathless or journey and finish it up with some shadow of the colossus and then you have this game.

As a fan of 3d platformers this game is a blast, just skating around, dashing, waving , grappling hooking into points to defeat enemy's is a lot of fun, sure the game isn't precise, but that's alright because the game isn't punishing either, quite the opposite really it respects the player with a clever checkpoint and retry system that incentivises you to go as fast as you can and to not be afraid to fail.

Overall a great experience, even though the narrative bits went a little over my head, those were just a little counterpoint to the mechanical prowess that Solar Ash provides.

um jogo do sonic mas sem musica chiclete.
A gameplay é gostosa e enfrentar os bosses gigante é bem satisfatório, principalmente quando vc entra num flow e consegue derrotar em uma ou poucas tentativas.
os ambientes tbm são legais e a historia, apesar de ser um pouco confusa, até que compensa pelo ser final bom e a interpretação da Rei é fenomenal, adorei a dublagem.
Foda que, certamente eu esquecerei desse jogo em uns 2 meses, recomendo jogarem mas é só isso, um jogo de final de semana quase esquecível.

Extremely flawed, to be sure: the art direction and atmosphere feel like they'd have better suited an abstract narrative told largely through implication (like Heart Machine's previous game Hyper Light Drifter) than the fully voiced, dialogue-heavy story here; enemies kept knocking me to the ground or killing me during platforming sequences when I had to get lucky just to successfully attack them; and while I somewhat respect the minimal handholding aside from a few objective markers, I felt I still ended up spending too much of my playtime aimlessly wandering around for a path forward. And all that said, the excellent traversal, great art direction, and Shadow of the Colossus-meets-Journey -meets-Mario Galaxy-meets-Zelda gameplay were enough to keep me playing through the end. A qualified recommendation, but even with its frustrations, still worth trying if that mix of influences sounds compelling.

For HeartMachine's second ever game, it hits that nice sweet spot of blaring ambition and drive to create something special and impactful, and ever just barely mitigated lack of experience from early and/or unrestrained game devs that mostly remains out of the way enough to appreciate what their vision can create. Realistically my review can be summated by this (unnecessarily long) sentence, however ignoring the specifics of why this game slaps is doing an injustice to both the ingenuity of the developers and your, the reader's, understanding of the game from an outside perspective.

So, just to keep my praise contained, I will follow the game's example and start with the negatives. Learning to control your character in this game is a requirement to experiencing the killer back 2/3rds of the game, and is both improperly communicated and surprisingly complex to master. This is at it's core a platformer, a very strange movement focused version of a platformer, but the focus is still on overcoming challenges relating to traversing platforms and so you need somewhat of an ability to perform that task, plus mastering the movement always unlocks more enjoyment in performing that task (also I've heard this is very similar to Jet Set Radio, but I haven't played that yet so idk). The worst moments of the game are when it forces the camera into a scripted sequence, or the game removes all of your abilities beyond walking for story segments. These scripted experiential moments would be great if either the game developed it's story beyond what it already is, or this was not a movement focused game where an inability to move shunts your enjoyment. Next I've got a pet peeve with hidden collectibles requiring exploration in games designed to blitz past segments of the world, however the game is designed to feel like you are exploring the Ultravoid despite the very linear platforming level design so whatever.

Very few things feel better than running around the Ultravoid at full speeds, chaining dashes following jumps and grapples, pathing along the plasma laid out between and through the environment. The major limitation on your character at any given moment is your inability to easily turn, however it's rarely an issue given proper pathfinding and proper uses of mechanics. The game's first and foremost goal is to make you feel like a voidrunner (hey it's the thing on the last line) as it assumes you must do, and I almost always felt like a dexterous warrior too fast to be hit and too fast to ever stop. The game makes this assumption as it does not ever enforce a time limit on your experience, and so it expects your interactivity to feel fast to reinforce your character's mad dash to save their planet against inevitability.

But on that note, the level design is surpringly well integrated into the absolute dexterity of your capabilities in surprisingly subtle ways. Paths are always wide enough to allow variance in progression, but narrow enough so you gotta bonk your head a few times. Environmental mechanics such as railgrinding or grappling were a bit finicky but served to throw mix-ups into the monotony of running around constantly, and worked particularly well to introduce more linear segments following open exploration. The open segments felt simultaneously expansive for mechanical freedom and limiting in mechanical intrigue, I like myself some boundless clouds but not all the time. The shadow of the colossus style bosses mixed up the progression platform puzzles into further time-trial-esque tests of ability. The highlight for me is world/chapter/location 5, as the large flat plateau introduces a simple radiation hazard testing your dexterity in traversal between points of safety as a timer slowly ticks towards instant death. Which the death is just the right balance of punishing and a non-issue, the only change brought by death is requiring to hit a box and moving back to an earlier checkpoint in your path.

Speaking of, the path looks weirdly delightful in an simplistic off-cartoon sort of way you only really get out of generative rendering. This game somehow has a very similar combined style to both Risk of Rain 2 (if it was cohesive and realised (for lack of my own vocabulary)) and Hyper Light Drifter. Switching between the flat and typically rounded open vistas or twisting levels into moments of high-contrast 2D animation elevates the visual identity of this game from Hyper Light Drifter, whilst becoming something uniquely characterised of it's own. My only complaint was that the game was so visual pleasing, the markers or points of interest were difficult to differentiate amongst the painting.

The music does not follow in the art style however, as it prefers to directly iterate on Hyper Light Drifter's soundtrack. I personally prefer this soundtrack, however I'm comparing Windows 10 to Windows 11 here, it's basically more of the same with minor tweaks (which is downplaying the effort spent on it's creation, however this is the result I experienced). Also, mainly cause I don't know where else to mention this, the voice acting is surprisingly good and well edited into the voice logs scattered about the Ultravoid.

And finally, for the first time in HeartMachine's history, this game has a narrative. At first I felt as if the studio's strength in telling stories lay in not telling them directly, as the narrative in the first 2 chapters wasn't very interesting, however those parts they weren't saying yet were told later and damn they can execute. Unfortunately though, the main character remains as boring to listen to as possible the entire way through, however that boredom is skewed by the story presented. HeartMachine understands the unique method of storytelling you can perform through interactivity, and so I must apologise for underestimating the intentionally obvious optional lore collectibles as they are as integral to the story as the actual events of the narrative. There was not a single time where my actions did not contribute towards the story being told, as the themes relating to the indifference of existence, possible meanings of consciousness in existence, and grief in these larger contexts pervey every fiber of this game's creation (yes, I'd argue even just being afk at a checkpoint counts in this context). I don't know if you can tell this story in a different medium, or even under a different storyteller, and so I struggle to say if anyone else may have the same experience I did.

This is an amazing second go around for HeartMachine, though it took me a fair chunk of the run time to realise exactly what I was in for. This felt like a lesser version of walking into Everything Everywhere All At Once for the first time and expecting a fun time with an alright narrative, then being very sorely mistaken. The start of the game will probably turn people away, and despite my praise I have to recommend that you let it turn you away, I don't think this game will work with everyone. Some iteration on the mechanics, pacing, soundtrack, moments of gameplay, and dialogue would definitely improve this game from it's creators' lack of experience, however these negative elements never ruined or even showed up often in my experience. I love movement games so my opinion is skewed for this particular matter, but this may be one of my top 5 games of the decade.

Really makes you feel like the endless matter compounding ash into clouds under the weight of a star's berth