Late last night, as I stood in a floating church, looking up at the sky through the bones of the broken ceiling, an island hangs above my head. The island is facing downwards, so where there should be stars, I saw mottled grass and noble pines. It’s beautiful and fun and I wonder how to get there.
This is Solar Ash, and Solar Ash is a skating game, really. It’s a cosmic skating game with a spectacular ice rink, and it definitely doesn’t want you to stop moving for even a second. You are a frictionless ghost in the landscape here, just will and direction. Earth bends in strange, hopeful paths. Connections are forgiving—even the milled rails have a magnetic levitation dream to them, so you can get on and off at will. The sky is very clear, the ground is usually cloudy, and the pile of soft pearl blue duvet supports you, but it’s brilliant that you still disappear into the fuzzy depths for the first few seconds before the power takes you back to the surface. . Soaking in the Clouds: A good start to the day.
It makes sense. According to the fragmented narrative, the whole thing is set in a black hole, a mosaic of ancient stories that will rebuild itself brick by brick if you have the energy to find the pieces. There’s a lost world that might be saved, so you skate while space and time do weird black hole things. Schwarzschild! Mobius! We are now in their world, suspended. So you explore. You battle alien creatures with glowing eyes, beaks, and bone cloaks. As you pass by, each intense battle takes place in seconds, ideally, without stopping. It feels like part of a crossing rather than an interrupted battle.
Beaks and bones! But despite the wildness of the environment, there is order here. In Solar Ash, you traverse a series of different platform landscapes, in each of which you must destroy a series of targets to summon the resident beasts in the landscape. It’s a huge thing that is a landscape in itself, so once it appears, you have to destroy it too, then head to the next landscape to repeat the pattern with smart changes.
This structure might look similar to The Pathless, let’s say another elegant game published by Annapurna, about the fun of exploration and galloping movement, you move from one territory to another, doing three of this and four of that to summon a beast and must send. But the structure is what the two games really have in common. In The Pathless, you must constantly gain elastic momentum by firing arrows at scattered targets. Its levels are large and often boldly open, reminding me of the kind of white-box space I always imagine developers conjure up to test new ideas.
When it comes to level modeling, The Pathless prefers basins or valleys. Meanwhile, Solar Ash loves cozy, sophisticated spaces, corkscrews, pyramids and tangles. Manhattan skyline and Christmas tree. Propulsion is a ready-made gift here – as soon as you pull the trigger, it’s waiting for you. Without that, you have to focus on digging clean lines in these complex spaces, jumping from rock to rock, climbing climbable black slime spray, traversing temples or collapsing skyscrapers, tapping lines by tapping Boxes transform into jumping pads, as well as create brand new rails by jabbing weird fungal macaroons as you pass by.
These landscapes are the soul of Solar Ash, and the greatest joy of the game comes when you reach a new area and see the glorious confusion that awaits. 30 skyscrapers are concentrated in one area, commercial towers, and you spin through these towers as you avoid the old subway trains strewn on the tracks. The next area may turn off the lights, allowing you to open color-coded doors by bathing in the correct alien spores. Then there’s a poisonous beach where honey ruins sit under a sky full of twisted strands of clouds. 3D art is the soft, sun-baked kind. Stones feel warm and even mushrooms look cozy. but! The place is alive – probably the fluff under your feet rather than the grass – but it’s also a blooming fantasy of death. You gallop past the beak-like thing that slaps past, the silent, long-vacant buildings towering overhead and below, the landmines that look like flu viruses, and talk of futile conflict. I guess also all these fungi: life is the most disturbing.
The landscape fits perfectly with your movement. Use the trigger to skate, then choose a direction. Jump on the rails to grind them. Fire up the rechargeable booster when you need an extra burst of speed. Use limited slow motion on tricky intersections, and use grab points (or enemies) to lock on and quickly traverse the landscape and deliver cosmic headbutts. At times, the boldness of the actions you link together seems to pass from one side of the screen to the other. At times, the characters you control will laugh out loud because of the sheer wild nature of what the two of you are engaged in.
And those beasts. Each is triggered by clearing small puddles of animal black slime located around the level. It’s really a traversal challenge, the timer ticks as you move between attack points, and you do everything with a needle in a pink whale eye in a puddle, which is also a monster in a way . Each one you complete will sharpen the landscape and bring the behemoths in the sky closer to sobriety. When it finally wakes up, you bravely grab it and glide across its prickly surfaces – a spider basketball, a withered phoenix – as the world passes under your feet, over and over Tremble between new attack points in increasingly tricky waves.
From the freewheeling fun of your movements reminiscent of Jet Set Radio, to the way the game twists the camera and sends you below, it’s not hard to unravel the dense weave of potential influences in Solar Ash that you spend half an hour getting from Objects explored from different angles, a Mario Galaxy. Those beasts should probably call the game’s most famous Colossus, or at least the Sandbird in Mario Sunshine.
But they rarely do. What’s special about Solar Ash, I think, is that all of these semi-familiar parts go through a series of deeper influences that feel completely personal – so personal that I’m not entirely sure they belong in the game Its a designer or for me, a player, I just imagine them. I caught a glimpse of it, though, a deeper, richer game lurking within the familiar, moving around and stretching itself within its limitations. I glimpsed it like a rideable cloud to be overheard like stout myelinated nerves, or to give way to alien hustle and humanity with the searing Icarus heroism of the Vangelis theme The thumping way of homeostasis.
Isn’t there something inherent in this space? Will its enemies be glial cells or macrophages, its hallmark lymph nodes or organs? Are these mushrooms scattered around, or are the neurons’ aromatic synapses ready to unleash their nebulizer bursts?
This brings me to a video game influence that can’t be ignored. Solar Ash is the spiritual sequel to Hyper Light Drifter. Both games were created by the same team, and while I doubt the connection between the stories is clear, they definitely pick up on the same unspoken concerns. There’s a lovely sense of progression between games – from closed 2D to panoramic 3D, from sharp pixel art edges and raster stones to soft clouds, rounded hills, those thick alien tar balls – and continuity. Both games love quiet, empty moments, and when it finally arrives, give the action an extra kick. Both love wilderness and rocks. Both love to paint in Topshop Color’s vibrating palette, especially celebrating the strange harmony of pink and teal. Both are busy games about loneliness.
I’ve played Hyper Light Drifter twice, and it’s only the second time that I really feel that at the heart of this beautiful, precise, and easily marketable thing, my personal work is brewing. Heart might be the right word. Illness often slips into the room, cloud of metaphors and analogies. It demands to be understood. So you fight disease. You dig deep, it won’t let it win. Maybe your doctor threw the book away. Hyper Light Drifter feels like it kind of emerged from this analogy: Heart Machine creative director Alx Preston helped shape this thing from his own experience with heart disease (which I think I remember).
I played that game and felt like I was allowed to get up close and personal with a metaphor of a private disease that cannot be fully understood from the outside – isn’t that true beauty and power and its absolute privilege? Inevitably, I wondered: what happened next? Do metaphors change over time?
All of which is to say: I don’t know if you’ve ever had a lumbar puncture, but trust me when I say Solar Ash is probably the most successful lumbar puncture game ever. Not a criticism! Really, it makes sense: it’s already the Jet Set Radio in your limbic system, so why not throw an injection and hit the spine.
Every boss you hit is there: you jump from bone to bone, vertebra to vertebra, past rivers of mucus that may be smooth nerve threads. Those attack points you move look a bit like a syringe, surely it’s not a coincidence? The medicalized body in all its terrifying delicacy. You smash each syringe and move on, and the feeling is not just progress, another node descending, another beast being cared for, but a deeper, more painful constant illumination. Is this thing real? does it matter? I’d love to say that, at least for me, it’s the kind of thing that transformed the Hyper Light Drifter from an elegant and sleek design into a truly personal item, a sparkling gem formed at least in part by the stress of Preston’s own experience. .
Of course, like any work of art, Sun Ash is ultimately concerned with a series of things, some of which are contradictory. I like that for the most part, you can make your own connections and find your own meaning. Enthusiasm, apprehension, undivided attention, all books are on the shelf here. Read what you want.
Speaking of books. Whenever I think of Ultralight Drifter, I think of a library, high on a mountain, with tattered bookshelves and windows open to the biting wind. An unforgettable place.
Well, I also found a library in Solar Ash – last night, off the main road, hidden in a void in the earth. A dome-like space with a tree running through it, its roots entangled with books stacked here and there. For a game about movement, this must mean a lot to me, and I’m here to stop for a while and just stand still to take it all in.
