Solar Ash

My time with Solar Ash is crystalized by the two opposing forces of fun and frustration.

Throughout Heart Machine’s second game, I was thrilled with the sense of serene beauty and speed as main character Rei skated across clouds and gravity-defying landscapes. Solar Ash proudly wears inspiration on its sleeve. Much like Hyper Light Drifter paid tribute to The Legend of Zelda yet remained singularly unique, Solar Ash does not shy away from staples like Shadow of the Colossus and Super Mario Galaxy. Hell, one might pepper in a bit of Tony Hawk Pro Skater or Jet Set Radio.

It’s in those pockets of familiar comfort that Solar Ash creates its most ideal synergy. Rather than merely climbing up a monstrous leviathan, players skate and jump across its carapace. Gravity and perspective shifts around globular environments, defying logic at dizzying vantage points. There’s a warmth and mystique about its world and gameplay, an allure that constantly reminded me that I was having a great time.

Yet I can’t escape that nagging feeling constantly eroding my memory of Solar Ash. At one moment I would be swept up in Troupe Grammage’s Disasterpeace-inspired soundtrack, grinding along a rail as distant playable lands loomed in the background. The next I would miss a calculated jump and fall, fall, fall… forced to repeat seconds if not minutes of gameplay. And then it would happen again.

Solar Ash got me to the point where I shouted in anger at the screen, a slave to confusion and frustration as to why something so simple felt so foreign and broken to me. Over the halfway point through the game, players are asked to grind and jump across small alien craft idly hovering in the sky, hoping to reach a point high up in the playable space. Electrified rails allude to eventual shortcuts that will be unlocked to make traversal less of a hassle. I spent the next 30 minutes of a 10-hour game stumbling around like it was my first time with a platformer. Was this user error or poor design?

Earlier this year I was left thrilled by the on-rails sections of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, watching the scenery around me explode as I would perform carefully timed jumps to avoid death. Ratchet would seamlessly jump left or right on a rail and his boots would slam down, magnetized without any worry on my end. Rei, on the other hand, would often miss her transfer when jumping from rail to rail, regardless of how careful I was. And this reality came to an agonizing head when I attempted to jump and grind across these small, tight platforms of landmasses and tiny spacecraft.

This section of Solar Ash made the rough edges of the game even sharper and jagged. I started to feel like the game wasn’t fast enough, that gliding along the worlds was not seamless nor serene. My warm experiences in the game were becoming cooler with each passing minute and each baffling stumble…

Solar Ash is by no means a slog. Actually, it is a wonderful game that nestled itself in my mind in the last month of 2021, a year that has seen an incredible amount of games. I had high hopes since seeing it premiere in whatever PlayStation 5 showcase it was first teased in and knowing the strength of Hyper Light Drifter. As information about the game slowly trickled out, I kept a close eye on it, not being completely certain what was to be expected, even after watching a brief glimpse of gameplay.

The direct approach taken by Solar Ash‘s story directly contrasts to its illusive world. Rei is a Voidrunner and her people have mastered void technology in hopes of using a device called the Starseed to release their planet from being consumed by the black hole-like Ultravoid. To power the Starseed, Rei needs to defeat six imposing Remnants that act as the bosses of the various areas of the game. Along the way, players will encounter a handful of NPCs, hidden notes, and audio logs that will spill out further details of what is going on in this universe.

Constantly I pushed myself to discover these hidden nuggets of exposition that would hint at an outcome I expected early on. Despite many aspects of the story’s end being telegraphed early on, I never found myself bored or not wrapped up in a revelation.

Much of the world building alludes to the truth Rei will ultimately discover. The Ultravoid is like a vacuum, sucking up planets and tearing them to pieces. In Solar Ash, players will skate into similar but disparate zones, acting as territories that have succumbed to the Ultravoid. Shoved together like misplaced puzzle pieces, the scant traces of civilization and people will illuminate some of the universe, but not much. Religions, political structures, architecture, and technology are all cobbled together.

Players will find mushroom colonies from an earlier zone have collided with the hot magma of another. And while there is an explanation to the madness, it often serves to just simply look stunning. Solar Ash is a stylish game, much like Heart Machine’s previous work. Skirting across fluffy blue clouds into sickly green toxic pools to then traverse from dilapidated skyscrapers to moody cave systems is exhilarating, meaning that each new location feels like an obvious surprise.

To progress through the game, players must attack corrupted zones of a particular area to unlock an engagement with a Remnant. To find these zones, players can activate an ability that shows where they are or where the next objective is. Corrupted zones are covered with a black goo that Rei can climb across. Additionally, there are needle-like objects that must be attacked within a time limit to expose a weakpoint. Attack all the weakpoints and the Remnant will “awaken” and be vulnerable to attack.

These corrupted zones serve as Solar Ash‘s primary platforming puzzles. Often requiring quick thinking and agile movement, attacking the first needle usually triggers the black goo to become “hot” and glow an increasingly more vivid red, eventually burning Rei up and starting the sequence over. Rarely did I find these moments in the game exceptionally difficult. More often than not, there’s a specific but not always obvious path players should take or a way to activate a rail that allows Rei to move faster in the race against the clock.

The moment when a Remnant is awakened and begins to stomp or fly or crawl across the entire playable space is impressive, despite never equally matching what I felt when I first played Shadow of the Colossus the first time over a decade ago. Despite their imposing size and the stakes of a dying planet, Solar Ash simply has a different mood.

Maybe it was the dreamy swell of the music or the sleepy movement of the first Remnant as it swam amongst the clouds that made me approach large swaths of Solar Ash so casually. Players seek out a point along the Remnant they can grapple to and begin the process of taking it down. A process that doesn’t stray from the first Remnant to the last.

Similar to a corrupted zone, players will attack the first needle appearing on the Remnant and then follow the line of needle points before finally attacking the final weakpoint. Initially, a Remnant is covered in a white, bone-like carapace with parts of its body exposed as that same black goo. Players must skate across the surface of the Remnant, jumping over gaps to avoid the slowing goo. After the Remnant’s weakpoint is attacked for the first time, pieces of its armor fall off, creating more hazardous terrain for Rei to cross. Gearing up for the third assault, players can expect a missed jump to result in a reset as the Remnant’s flesh is now searing red.

The fundamentals are the same but Solar Ash does an admirable job of trying to make each Remnant encounter different enough to not feel completely identical to the other. Increasingly tight windows of time, more difficult needles to attack, and harder jumps to land ensure a gradual increase in challenge. Thankfully, once a player attacks a Remant’s weakpoint, they do not have to repeat a previous segment if they fall or die.

And that’s going to happen often. But before I address that, it’s important to note how Solar Ash handles movement and what players do in between fighting Remnants.

Rei is capable of skating across most flat surfaces and rails. She’s a fairly agile character, living up to her title of voidrunner. Players can get a bit more speed with a boost that operates on a fairly short cooldown. Rei is also equipped with a simple attack and an ability to slow down time that also allows her to grapple points and enemies from a greater distance. Non-Remnant combat in Solar Ash is fairly bland as most enemies can be taken down in a few hits and serve as the most minor of threats. One enemy type that clings to a wall and fires a beam of energy is used sparingly in the game, requiring the player to move in and out of cover to close the distance for an attack.

More interesting is the way in which Heart Machine designed the world to exist as these strangely shaped spheres with fairly accurate gravity. If the playable area in the game is presented as a round ball, Rei is capable of skating from one pole or hemisphere to the other. Surprisingly, when the gravity shifts in the game, the camera rarely misses the mark, preventing players from becoming too disoriented during a traversal, combat, or puzzle moment.

At several moments, players will be ushered into a moment where they crest a hill or a ramp and are met with a dizzying new perspective, often revealing a new area they will explore or making a previous zone shrink to the size of an ant. Perhaps Solar Ash‘s best moments are in these incredible moments where the volume of the Ultravoid and the planets it has soaked up comes in full focus. Near the end of the game players will be reach dizzying heights and be able to see the shadowy landmarks of the farthest areas of the world with the Starseed always looming in the center. An especially masterful moment has Rei activating a rail that sends her spiraling from one distant asteroid back to a starting location that was likely tread upon half an hour ago. The player hops on and watches the scenery go by as the soundtrack queues up another chilling moment.

Though exploration in Solar Ash can be wistfully enjoyable, I do think there will be a portion of players who will have difficulty navigating its swirling, organized chaos. Knowing the general area of a corrupted zone is easy, getting to that location might not be entirely clear as it can take a few extravagant platforming situations to find proper footing.

And honestly, the game is comprised of a lot of empty, negative space where there isn’t much to do except use surface as a place to land and engage another double jump. Players can collect plasma which acts as a kind of currency. But this currency is only used to repair a health point that is destroyed after each Remnant fight–a mechanic which sort of has a narrative purpose but truly feels pointless. The only time I ever needed health was during a Remnant fight or an exceptionally difficult or confusing puzzle. Fighting simple enemies felt like a needless distraction on the way to finding a chunk of lore or a way to unlock more progress.

So I find my way back to the Remnant fights. I enjoyed them, to a point. But like that frustrating platforming section I mentioned earlier, my patience began to wear thin. One thing to keep in mind is that Solar Ash has a few difficulties which allow for less tight windows in timed sections. I didn’t play on the hardest difficulty and still found that a few parts of these Remnant fights required incredibly precise movement and a keen sense of not landing in the wrong place.

By the time players are on the third attack phase, they have already climbed these massive beasts twice. Maybe the left wing has been skated across instead of the right but it still leads to the same result. On the third, most difficult phase, I would often make a wrong move or not know where to go next at just the right moment and fail the sequence. I would either fall on the ground or be taken back to a safe space and have to repeat the sequence again and possibly chase down the Remnant across the map.

Players who don’t succeed after three or four attempts are probably going to grow increasingly frustrated or disinterested with each failure, not just because they are failing but because having to repeat long, easier sections stops being fun or remotely surprising. Instead, Solar Ash‘s Remnant fights become about rote memorization rather than the thrill of felling a massive foe.

Compounding these issues is a fundamental problem I had with the game’s movement. Rei is no Ratchet, let alone a Mario. There were times I couldn’t nail down how Rei’s momentum worked, at times maintaining speed after grinding along a rail only to jettison into lava, other times coming to a dead stop. Rei would slide around or move forward without me having to push up on the left stick. Sometimes she would flub a jump if I pushed off at the wrong angle. In combat, I forgot about the ability to slow time but relied on it for shooting across grappling distances on a Remnant but also found difficulty in knowing how far away I could be before it allowed me to teleport.

Ultimately, I can forgive my issues with the Remnants because they were meant to be Solar Ash‘s greatest challenge. Frustration or disappointment would be wiped away after landing that final slash and watching the screen wash away with color.

What I can’t forgive, though, were those moments where I was constantly falling. I kept losing time, forced to repeat my actions because the game couldn’t decide when I was connecting with a rail and instead I fell through it like it wasn’t even there. When I unlocked a shortcut I didn’t feel joy, just thankful that the bullshit was over.

Personally, I hate that those moments tainted Solar Ash for me. But as I began to reflect on them, I noticed how they rang true for much of my experience with the game. A blissfully incredible moment would be soured by a faulty mechanic or a tedious design choice. All I really wanted to do was race across these alien worlds with exaggerated speed and watch horizon-blotting monsters crumble after dancing across their bodies. But there’s also the chance that I wasn’t in the right headspace for Solar Ash, that for other people, these issues won’t even register. And honestly, despite my fundamental problems with crucial parts of the game, I cannot walk away from it not saying that I didn’t enjoy the things I truly came to appreciate.

Solar Ash excels when it captures that dream-like feeling of gliding across cosmic, surreal spaces. There are moments when the speed of Rei’s skates across the back of a terrifying monster will exhilarate, reminding players why they love games. But as a platformer, Solar Ash can be tedious, repetitive, and a bit clumsy. While these issues may clash with the lovingly crafted world and gravity-defying puzzles, they never truly harm what is ultimately a uniquely engaging game.