Striking visual style. As I progressed the art style lacked variety in each new area. It wasn’t until I got to the dark mushroom land that it felt distinctly different and by that point, I’d tired of the gameplay to keep playing.

The mix of speedy and fluid movement of Jet Set combined with Shadow of the Colossus boss fights sounds like a match made in heaven, but I found it to be a bit of a drag to play. The movement for one needed a break up in tedium. Maybe a button press would make you do different dance moves idk. Something to keep movement interesting to watch. I hated backtracking if you fell off any platform. Usually there was only one way up, leading to substantial treks back to the shortcut rail up the building.

The combat was one-note and felt kinda spammy. The animations were great though.

The boss fights were a mix of light platforming and clicking a button when you’re within range of an attack spot to zip to that point. It just felt like it played itself. Wasn’t challenging enough for my liking. I was hoping for more of the puzzle platformer feel of SotC where you find their weak point.

I enjoyed the story and the conversations with the void god, but I found the voice logs that pertain to one member of your crew per new area to be lacking. A lot of the voice acting for the side characters was melodramatic and it played out the same way each time (finding the place of their death).

The ethereal music was fine. Nothing notable. Where this game excelled was in animations. Everything was fluid and beautiful. Killing each colossus was brilliant to watch.

I really wanted to love this game, but there just wasn’t enough to keep me hooked. If you want an easier platforming game, with simple combat, and a thought-provoking story, I think you’ll like this one. I was just expecting a bit more depth.

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.

Version: Xbox Series X
System: Xbox Series X

Played via Xbox Game Pass

I had never really heard about this game before I saw that it got added to Game Pass, but I guess something about the trailers, screenshots, and the fact that it was published by Annapurna was enough to convince me to play this game, and I do not regret it. Just like the Ultravoid the game takes place in, Solar Ash feels like a variety of other games mixed together into a new and stunning experience. The story is captivating, and keeps you interested as to how this area got the way it is. And the ending is trippy but amazing as well. I actually got both the good and bad endings on purpose, and the good ending in particular was fantastic. However, the game can feel repetitive at times, due to every level essentially having the same structure, and your main character giving similar reactions to the same events that happen in every level every time. Also, despite the clear undertones of what the story represents, a lot of the sci-fi jargon gets confusing and plain stupid after a while. Still, I had a lot of fun with this one, and I have to say I think it passed my expectations, considering I had no idea what to expect.

8.5 / 10.

Una pequeña aventura de mundo semi abierto con mucho movimiento, plataforming y algo de combate.
El skating era divertido, en especial en partes abiertas (aunque se sentía como ir sobre hielo y era difícil mantener una linea derecha para juntar plasma). El problema era en lugares cerrados y principalmente el movimiento en el cuerpo de los jefes, se sentía como que no tenía control total del personaje y fue la parte mas frustrante del juego.
No me llamó la atención la historia pero el voice action, particularmente del personaje principal me gustó mucho (en especial cuando expresaba alguna emoción fuerte).
Fue algo corto y un par de gimmicks no los disfruté, pero cuando logro tener un flujo de juego continuo de un lado a otro se vuelve muy divertido. Parece un juego divertido de speedrunnear!

Simple yet enjoyable gameplay loop held down by smooth movement & gorgeous art direction. The clean geometry & bold colours really make each area pop & there's a great sense of scale throughout the entire game. Unfortunately the story didn't grab me at all & it was quite a large focus. I also didn't like the voice acting & sometimes corny & cliché writing. These aspects really made me appreciate how Hyper Light Drifter has no dialogue as it guarantees that this can't happen.

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.

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

The mechanics were very fluid and I enjoyed the plot. I had a lot of major bug issues that crashed my game, it got repetitive at times however it's a very short game and I won't hold that against it. If I didn't experience game terminating issues I would have likely rated this a 4, due to multiple crashes I did not give the bits of readable lore more attention than the bare minimum.
If you have a few hours give it a shot but if it crashes at all turn off V-Sync and that /should/ solve the issue.

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.

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.

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.

This is a game I was hot and cold on. The art style is vibrant and interesting and traversing the world is a lot of fun. However, where it loses me is with the speed mechanics involving the bosses and some of the puzzles. Some of you speed runners out there might love this one!

Every boss battle is basically made up of 3 phases and each one features an increasingly difficult time trial race where you're trying to move as fast as you can while also hitting posts along the way. On paper, this is a lot of fun, but in practice, some times it just feels disconnected.

While you may get into a groove on some of these phases other times it feels like the floor or plates that you're skating on (the bosses usually have a bunch of broken skin, or bone all over them) isn't where it needs to be to accomplish the task at hand.

Let's say you hit a post, turn around to get to the next one and see a huge gap in front of you and as you move and jump, you may not get up enough speed and fall in and have to start the phase over. OR you get too much speed and you sail over the post you need to hit. OR you were short on speed and it looks like you won't make it, but for some reason you do? Judging the jumps and what speed you needed to go on these broken plates/floors is really what ruins the flow and the fun, especially when you end up having to do the same phase over and over.

The game is not awful or anything, it's manageable and I overalled enjoyed myself with this game but I could've done without some of the more frustrating parts. I would love to see a sequel with these issues ironed out because, honestly, the mechanic is like 90% there, it just needs a bit more attention to make it have that amazing feel that it really should have.