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.
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.