Playing: SOLAR ASH (2022)
This game had me so conflicted for so much of its runtime that I was wondering whether or not I’d end up giving it a positive review.
For months, I’ve been appraising only media I enjoy out of fear of ever again getting demeaned and gaslit for sharing an unpopular take, as had happened to me on another social media platform, and it broke my faith in the internet.
But, consuming media has come to feel far less meaningful if I don’t write about it afterwards, and if I spend several hours of my life experiencing a piece of media, I might as well write about it no matter how I end up feeling about it.
Thankfully, the rating up top should indicate my ultimate feelings on Solar Ash.
Developer Heart Machine’s first title was Hyper Light Drifter (2016), and while I appreciated the purely visual storytelling, beautiful pixel art style, and classic 2D Zelda vibes from what I played of it, its combat quickly overwhelmed me.
The studio’s sophomore effort, the subject of this article, is a 3D platformer that takes place in this same techno-organic world. We play as Rei, a no-nonsense—except for the occasional giggle—‘Voidrunner’ who’s trying to activate a device called the Starseed with the help of an endearing AI named Cyd to stop a black hole called the Ultravoid from destroying her planet.
Other Voidrunners have scattered throughout the shattered worlds inside the Ultravoid, and as we skate to traverse, we can find their audio logs telling the progress they made in their missions and how it made them feel, and collecting all the logs in each area gets us a new suit we can equip for a different ability.
Other characters of different species who got sucked into the Ultravoid flesh out the world, from a forgetful humanoid cat to an eccentric humanoid crab to a sect of New-Agey humanoid fungi. We can also collect globs of plasma to re-buy shield cells that we lose every time we complete an area.
Each area culminates in boss fights so big that they had me humming Shadow of the Colossus tunes. But while I called the battles in Shadow challenging, the bosses here make those look like a cake walk, because hitting these bosses’ weak spots are essentially timing puzzles that we have to start over every time we fail! So as a non-fan of timing puzzles, I’m glad there’s only seven bosses!
Questions are left unanswered along the way, such as those around the hint that humans exist in its world. How did we get to these other planets, and are we who taught these other species to swear and theorize the existence of God?
But what really had me conflicted was how dour the storytelling is. The side quests take so many tragic turns, and so many characters struggle with despair. Would nihilism have the ultimate say? Or, would it be a case where a hopeful ending is made all the more cathartic by the hopelessness leading up to it?
Thankfully, the ultimate say, while still challenging, is more hopeful than I feared: that we can never reverse disaster, but we can always rebuild from it.
And that makes Solar Ash as poignant as it is intriguing and inventive.
Sadly, Heart Machine recently had to make major layoffs and cut development short on their widely derided latest title, Hyper Light Breaker (2025). As such, I’m glad they produced at least one game that’s up my alley in their short run.