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.
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.