![]() ![]() And this attitude will not serve Solar Ash truthfully. ![]() In modern game critique, “above average” translates as “bad”. An equally emotive score also offers Rei sole companionship as she trips the light fantastic. Fans of Hyper Light Drifter will feel right at home with the Ultravoid’s converse blend of high-energy neon visuals and grim, nightmarish monsters. Solar Ash is an attractive, occasionally dazzling game, featuring vivid effects surreal, inviting landscapes and eye-popping colors - Heart Machine once again dives into its favorite palette of pink, magenta, violet, and turquoise. Of course, it would be remiss not to focus on two of the title’s best elements, the first being its exquisite stylized design. Purely in that regard, it’s a positive experience. This is, foremost, a game of orienteering. If you’re choosing to play for the story, for the action, or for genre evolution, then you’re likely to be disappointed. You are playing to search nooks and crannies, you are playing to navigate the highest heights and subterranean depths, you are playing to locate hidden logs and uncover suit upgrades. As you may have guessed Solar Ash is, ultimately, a game for explorers and wanderers. Rei finds a zone, cleans out the Remnants, defeats an Anomaly, activates a Starseed node, then moves to a new area to do it all over again. A tactic that can and has worked for many titles in the past. Solar Ash dares to be repetitive by design. Solar Ash often feels like a world in search of a game to occupy it, and while it is an undeniably attractive adventure, there is something incredibly “thin” about the whole affair, a pervading sense of unrealized promise that haunts the experience. Elements such as these feel anachronistic to the title’s interstellar “new world” design. One of her only forms of communication, Rei stumbles across written journals of both her fellow Voidrunners and the black hole’s victims. Not necessarily “lonely”, but empty in regards to engagement, direction, and motivation. Due to the game’s theme of isolation, plus the abstract nature of the world’s design, the Ultravoid can feel exceptionally empty. While this all sounds fairly positive, Solar Ash, unfortunately, carries with it some critically disengaging flaws. For the most part, traversal through the Ultravoid is exhilarating, though there’s no denying that more than a few deep sighs might exhale from your lips after a tumble. Thankfully, Solar Ash is relatively forgiving with sticking the landing, and will latch our girl onto rails, platforms, and the like with ease. While the world is designed in such a way as to lead the player to water, so to speak, it can be easy to get lost en route to your goals, to lose track of your orientation, or to simply slip from a great height and find yourself at the bottom of a tower you were hacking at for some time. Like so many third-person platformers, Solar Ash‘s traversal can be both a thing of beauty and the stuff of nightmares. The similarities between the two titles are readily apparent, from the quiet, dream-like atmosphere to the simple, rudimentary combat and (happily) the innate satisfaction of accessing areas that once seemed beyond your reach. Much like that title, Solar Ash tasks the player with navigating wide-open spaces, climbing to dizzying heights, cleansing an area of a form of “corruption” and engaging in an occasional boss battle, all within a serene-but-doomed landscape. ![]() While comparison is often regarded as a no-no in reviews, it is almost impossible not to make immediate collation to Ubisoft’s divisive 2008 release Prince of Persia. Goliath warfare, ( Shadow of the what?) Once a location has been cleared of all Remnant activity, a little more power is restored to the Starseed, the next sector opens, and Rei’s quest continues. After cleansing each locale, Rei will be confronted by a terrifying “Anomaly” - gargantuan guardians who must be mounted and destroyed in true David vs. checkpoints in order to ultimately activate the Starseed. Rei must pick her way through a string of sectors set within the Ultravoid, eradicating a gross, sentient, tar-like matter and locating various A.I. ![]() Waypoint finding, efficient movement, precise acrobatics, and good, old-fashioned nosing around are the core elements of this adventure. It should be noted, first and foremost, that exploration and traversal are the key elements of Solar Ash. ![]()
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