Solar Ash is eye-catching but seems to lack some of the poignancy Hyper Light Drifter had
The description creator Alx Preston uses when referring to his new game Solar Ash is “Mario Galaxy meets Shadow of the Colossus, and then sprinkle in a bit of Jet Set Radio”. He calls that “the dumb pitch”, but it’s really handy way of quickly creating an image of what this game – his next after Hyper Light Drifter – is like.
Solar Ash preview
- Developer: Heart Machine
- Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
- Platform: Demoed on PC, I think
- Availability: Releases 26th October on PC (Epic Games Store), and PlayStation 4 and 5
Solar Ash is a game about movement, a game about speeding around bizarre fantasy landscapes and confronting enormous bosses who live there. You skate on multicoloured clouds which bobble up behind you, and then you grind along glowing rails sprouting from alien pods. You fling grappling hooks to bridge chasms and you swing to new areas, and you scramble up sticky, sludgy growths to reach others. When you’re doing Solar Ash properly, you’re moving at speed.
It’s not, like Hyper Light Drifter, a game about combat. There is some but it’s there to make you think about the route you’ve picked, or to try and interrupt you. A few quick acrobatic hits see off most enemies and you’re on your way again, and it creates a flowing kind of feeling to the game.
Bosses follow the same logic. They’re so big that defeating them involves climbing them and treating them like moving levels of their own. Only then can you find their weak spots and bring them down, like in Shadow of the Colossus. And when the bosses get so big they engulf entire mini-planets, like the plated, lizardy boss I see – which is apparently the smallest of them all – Solar Ash begins to look a lot like Super Mario Galaxy. It’s even got that kind of cartoon sheen, that softness. Alx Preston would like it to play like a Mario game too, which is a heady goal, though having only seen someone else play it, I can’t tell if he’s managed.
