Late last night I stood in a floating church, looking up through the bones of the shattered ceiling towards the sky, where an island hung above me. The island was facing downwards, so where there should be stars, I saw patchy grass and the tops of noble pines. It was beautiful and teasing and I wondered how to get there.
Solar Ash review
- Developer: Heart Machine
- Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
- Platform: PC
- Availability: Out December 2nd on PC (Epic Games Store), and PlayStation 4 and 5
This is Solar Ash, and Solar Ash is a skating game, really. It’s a cosmic skating game with spectacular rinks and it absolutely does not want you to stop moving even for a second. You ghost frictionlessly over the landscape here, a thing of will and direction only. The earth curves away in strange, promising pathways. Connection is forgiving – even grind rails have a sort of mag-lev dreaminess to them, so you can hop on and off without much in the way of fiddliness. The sky is very clear and the ground is often cloud, soft duvet mounds of pearly blue that will hold you up but which, brilliantly, still see you disappearing into the blurred depths for a few early seconds before momentum carries you back to the surface. Dunked in a cloud: not a bad start to the day.
It makes sense. The whole thing is set inside a black hole, according to the fragmentary narrative, an old mosaic of a story that will reconstruct itself tile by tile if you have the energy to hunt for the pieces. There is a lost world that might yet be saved, and so you skate and skate while space and time do strange black-hole things. Schwarzschild! Mobius! We are in their world now, suspended. So you explore. You fight alien blob creatures with glowing eyes and beaks and mantles of bone. Brisk fights, each one, dealt with in a few sharp seconds as you pass by, ideally, without stopping. Fights that feel like a part of traversal rather than an interruption.
Beaks and bones! But despite the wild setting, there is order here too. In Solar Ash, you travel across a range of different platforming landscapes, and in each one you must destroy a series of targets in order to summon the landscape’s resident beast. This is a giant thing, a landscape in itself really, so once it appears you must destroy that too and head on to the next landscape where the pattern repeats with smart variation.
This structure might seem similar to that of The Pathless, say, another elegant Annapurna-published game about exploration and the rushing joy of movement, in which you moved from one territory to another, doing three of this and four of that to summon a beast that must then be dispatched. But structure is all the two games really share. In The Pathless you must constantly earn your elastic momentum by firing arrows at scattered targets. Its levels are vast and often daringly open, putting me in mind of the kind of pencilled-in white-box spaces I have always imagined that developers conjure in order to test out new ideas.