How do you make me even slightly uninvested with a game about skating across Black Holes on the verge of eating entire civilizations? That's actually kind of impressive.

I always was curious about Solar Ash when I first saw footage of it but...come to think of it, maybe the footage I saw was more different than I remember it being. Actually sitting down to play it was certainly an experience. Mostly good but man does this game lose steam almost halfway through the game. I know it sounds like I'm being more harsh right out of the gate so it's best if I explain the premise. Solar Ash is a platformer where you complete little micro challenges around an open ended area, and completing all of them unlocks a giant titanic monster to fight as the area's boss. Rinse and repeat around like like 5-6 times (forgot exactly how many areas there were) and that's about all it has to offer. The platforming challenges center around this black sludge, and staying on it for too long causes it to heat up and incinerate you. You basically need to hit these syringes embedded in the sludge in a certain order as quickly as possible (as the sludge heating up is now on a timer as soon as you hit these) in order to complete a challenge. These black sludge syringes are also the exact same with the boss fights, you need to platform across their massive bodies hitting the syringes in sequential order 3 times in order to take it down. Despite being the main challenges (and by proxy the ONLY challenges this game has to offer), they are pretty fun. They have sort of a "made it by the skin of your teeth" kind of vibe; because the timing's often pretty tight it does feel satisfying to complete a challenge, especially on hard mode. The main problem is...this is all the game really has to offer. Don't misunderstand me, there are other THINGS to do in this game but they feel more incidental by comparison. The exploration either amounts to audio logs that are laughable to say the least, fragments of your crewmate’s suits, or other side quest objectives that mainly are just there for achievement fodder and that's about it. You do get a special ability for collecting all the parts of a suit but the abilities in question are negligible passive upgrades in different areas. Like for instance the powers you can get from these suits amount to "deal a bit more damage", "gain more currency" (particularly useless considering that the only thing you can buy with currency is your energy shield slots and I was already near maxed on shields when I found this suit.), "slightly lower cooldown on your boosters", etc. The platforming challenges are all the game really has to offer, and to give credit Rei actually controls fairly well. She can skate around these fluffy cloud floors, boost and double jump and (thankfully) has a ledge grab though sometimes that ledge grab hasn't been the most responsive to activate. She can also grind rails and grapple pull to nearby objects but these are more so contextual abilities. While she feels good to control and all, I dunno...nothing about this movement system really WOWS me. There's not really any room for creative expression with the abilities you have. You don't even get a wall run JSR style or anything which should've been a no brainer personally. The speed you gain isn't that great either, unless you enjoy mashing the boost button over and over again.

I think the worst thing about this movement system is that the environments weren't really accommodated for it. Sounds a bit weird to say that but hear me out: the platforming challenges THEMSELVES are built around Rei's movement and capabilities; the space that lies in BETWEEN these challenges are not. These areas just sort of...exist. The most you're gonna be doing in these cloud areas are, what else, mashing the boost button until you can get to the next platforming challenge. Nothing much happens here. You do have a sort of anti-gravity effect where you roam around an area contained within a sphere and one challenge could be on the other side of the sphere, but nothing creative or interesting is done with this system. This issue is even further compounded by certain later game areas being way WAY too big for their britches. The Mirrorsea area was just so dull and meandering because it took too long to get from point A to point B, and the constant toxic sludge made the controller rumble so violently for such a long frequency that I actively got sick of it and needed to turn down the rumble frequency in the settings, something I NEVER once do in a game. I might sound corny for saying this, but man Sonic Frontiers really did spoil me when it comes to more open-ended designed platformers. I could do a billion other things with Frontiers’ moveset, Spindashing and leaping over large chunks of terrain, rail launching, doing little tricks in the air, getting distracted by a huge variety of bite sized challenges or puzzles on the way to the challenge I was headed to anyway, whereas here I can just…mash boost and eventually head to my destination. That’s about it.

Man though, don’t even get me started on the story. I have never been more disconnected and uninvested with a game’s story than I have been with this game. None of the characters are interesting in the slightest, the dialogue borderlines both “bland” and “Marvel tier” (Rei’s AI companion does this whole thing where “beep boop haha I do not understand sarcasm or figure of speech talk I am a robot beep boop” multiple times). You have a story with a bleak environment and setting, remnants of civilizations torn apart by this monstrous black hole with environmentalist undertones, a message about, more or less, the denial of grief and refusing to change course even when the circumstances become more and more dire. An interesting concept if, again, the characters were more interesting than a plank of wood. I never once felt a connection to Rei or any of the Voidrunner members because their characterization and dialogue is just so bland and forgettable. And for that matter, if Echo was, all this time, a part of Rei being trapped by the endless cycle of the Starseed and she constantly knew what would keep happening every single time, then why didn’t she just…explain everything to Rei at the very beginning of the game? As far as I’m aware, there wasn't really anything stopping her from doing this. This game probably would’ve been over a lot faster if you didn’t speak cryptic trailer-ese and if you didn’t keep crushing Rei after every encounter. Just…saying.

Overall though while I did have fun with Solar Ash, I can’t help but feel like it’s lacking a lot of things. The platforming challenges, while fun, are pretty much all the game has to offer and the structure does get fairly repetitious after a while. The visuals are psychedelic, colorful and pretty, and I even think the idea of having the platforming be built around the remnants of lost civilizations consumed by the Black Hole is a really cool idea (Broken Capital in particular was a standout highlight imo), but the story is too uninteresting to make any of these areas truly worthwhile.

Also side note, but if one of your characters’ names is something along the lines of “Tarragon Danderpaws” I legitimately cannot take it seriously I’m sorry LMAO