Solar Ash (2021)

Hyper Light Drifter is a quintessential critical darling, with a mysterious narrative, a fantastical post-apocalyptic world rendered in wonderfully intricate retro pixel art, and difficult gameplay that relies more on player skill than on character abilities or stat upgrades. Basically, it's a retro-style FromSoft game (minus the resource-drop mechanic and the math).

Solar Ash, on the other hand, is actually fun to play.

Don't get me wrong, I like Hyper Light Drifter, even the difficult gameplay. But while that difficulty felt worth overcoming, it was only because it was an obstacle between me and what I actually liked about the game. The gameplay itself was often grindy, tedious, frustrating—but it's what allowed me to see more of the game's beautiful world (and beautiful cinematics) and to engage with it's enticingly evocative story.

With Solar Ash, the world might be less intricately crafted and the story might be way more obvious, but I actually enjoy the, you know, game part of the game. Skating around and solving puzzles and bouncing of baddies and taking down bosses is really fun. It feels good to do. I didn't even mind looking for the logs or the NPC quests, because that just meant more time traversing the world, which instead of being a chore is one of the highlights of the game.

And it's not like the world or the story are bad. The environments are beautiful, though it's at a much larger scale than the more detailed art of HLD. The game creates a number of lookout spots and uses them to their full advantage, presenting impressive, mind-bending vistas of gravity-defying ruins and worlds bending in on themselves. And the story, though it may be an obvious climate change metaphor with a time-loop "twist" that they're not even really trying to hide, is well-told for what it is, with solid writing and a cast of compelling (if fairly 1-dimensional) characters, and lands its ending with a solid emotional 1-2 punch of despair and hope.

Yes, some of the platforming can be frustrating, and the collectible suits are largely pointless...but that's about all I can think of. It is otherwise a very well-made, interesting, fun game. I also beat it in 6 hours which in this day and age is a goddamn miracle.

If you want a combination of Gravity Rush 2, Ratchet & Clank (minus the guns), Shadow of the Colossus (yes, the camera can still be annoying but at least it's less tedious), and, narratively, Bastion, you should check it out.

(But also maybe wait for it to be on sale because $39.99 is, admittedly, a bit of an ask for a 6-hour game.)

After seeing the first trailer, I thought to myself "wow, this game really looks like a game Cosimo Galluzzi (@cosimogalluzzi on Instagram) would make", so when I discovered he was in fact the Lead Artist of Solar Ash, I was not shocked, but excited for sure.
Add to this that the game was made by the same team of the great Hyper Light Drifter, and, well, they got my attention.

The game is good, I enjoyed my time with it, but less than I expected.

I understood, you want to save everyone

Starting from the worst part, the narrative.
It felt too animey, Rei screamed too many times "I have to save everyone", it felt predictable.
The lore could be intriguing per se, has interesting turns here and there, but never really caught me.

The dialogs felt not so inspired or interesting, the voice over, I didn't like it honestly, specifically because I thought the voice actors were trying too hard, maybe to feel deeper, more poetic.
In particular, I really couldn't stand Tarragon Danderpaws voice, feeling so annoying in its attempts to feel poetic that I almost wanted to skip the dialogs (a thing I did sometimes, quickly reading through the text).

Besides, every dialog with Echo felt like a super big anime clichè.
It was clear from their first dialog what the plot twist would have been and made everything less interesting.
I also don't get why she only has 2 eyes, especially seeing how Rey laugh at a skeleton with only 2 of them, making you kinda get that she has more (and probably 3). It's not like a big deal but felt like they forgot about it.

As said, there were some interesting bits, like the Ultravoid idea, and the Umbra lore too, but it's just not enough to save the narrative.

Expectations and missed opportunities

I had great expectations about the soundtrack, coming from Hyper Light Drifter, and at first I thought they managed to deliver since the first tracks are so good! But I have to say that the quality is inconsistent.
Never bad, but sometimes nothing special, or worse, a bit generic.
The juicy sounds of the first tracks are not always there sadly.
I still have to listen to it fully outside the game so my opinion may change, this is only my experience while playing the game.

I've to say that also visually the quality is a bit inconsistent, even though always good.
It is very stylish, the animations feel good and smooth, the colors are pleasant, and I really liked the 3d flat/low-poly style, even though it feels a bit generic at times.
The thing I can say I really loved is the way they made the background, how it fades with different shades of colors.
It feels like a hand-drawn piece of art.
It was a pleasure to stop for some seconds and just turn the camera to look far away and enjoy it.

What I think though is a bit of a missed opportunity is how they used the sense of scale and the change of gravity.
Those are the two of the things that make this game stands out but sadly it feels like they didn't manage to get them to their full potential, and therefore the game has only a handful of sections using them.

When the sense of scale is there, it really makes you feel small, like I feel while looking at basically 99% of Cosimo artworks, but it just doesn't happen very often, and mostly during the boss fights.
This is even more true for the change of gravity perspective.
It is so cool when you look down and everything is upside down, and the game basically starts with a perspective like this, but it doesn't really get back to it until, like, the 5th level?, and really only has a small amount of sections that use it. Such a waste!

Skating among meditative and epic

The best part of the game was the gameplay itself.
The game has maybe a slow start, and it takes some time to understand what it is about and, therefore, to fully appreciate it, but when I managed to get into it, I played without worrying about getting to the end, because it was a pleasure, and also sort of chilling.

Explore a new area is funny, it is sort of charming to move through it with the skating-like movement, feels very dynamic, and the level design is good for most of the game and it's funny to look for secret areas.
It rarely is a challenge, the game is very forgiving, but maybe this is what I liked about it, that even though the game was about the end of Rei's home planet, it sort of felt like I had all the time, it was relaxing, sort of meditative.

The way they integrate new elements is enough to not make it feel boring after a while, and also manage to give every area a sort of personal touch.
There are not really a lot of gameplay elements anyway, and it could feel repetitive, but for me that was what made it enjoyable, probably because it made the game even more chilling.

Another thing that helps it feel less repetitive is how they handled the bosses.
Even though the game has a sort of combat mechanic, the bosses are not about that, but are a sort of platform section that you have to complete fast and precisely.
Even though it can be frustrating, in the end I found myself enjoying trying to beat the bosses, memorize what moves I have to perform, where to go, and it also felt epic.
They give the game a change of pace, in a nice loop of chill (exploration) and adrenaline (bosses).

I also liked that they integrated the anomalies, that you have to clear before getting to the boss.
These are a sort of mini-bosses that, again, help the pace of the game, and, even if not challenging as the bosses, are still engaging, and sometimes even clever.
I admire how they created basically just one mechanic, the movement one, and managed to use it for both exploration and "combat".
It makes the gameplay feel very tight, very well thought and gives it a personality, and not just 200 different mechanics put together because u don't know how to make something enjoyable.

Until you slip

It's not everything good though.
First, even though the gameplay feels very dynamic and smooth, it's not as much as you would probably expect.
You rarely skate for more than 1-2 sec, you have to stop to look where to go, to make a jump, to climb (why climbing has not been made more fluid? it feels so slow).
This is not a big issue, it's just that I expected it to be more tailored around always moving and never breaking the flow, so I needed a bit of time to adjust to what it truly is.

The movement itself feels, at times, not very predictable.
This is not much of an issue during plain exploration, but while doing anomalies, and specifically bosses, it's very annoying, because this adds more trial and error that is needed, making it feel frustrating.
It happens not so rarely that u jump and the speed goes brr and you just fly away from the boss, or that you use the boost and get the same result, or just that the boost was not ready yet for a millisecond and you just lose the flow and die (this at least can be controlled).
Or again, that you don't get the momentum you would have expected before a jump.

I also sort of hated how the hook mechanic was utterly inconsistent. There is not a specific distance from which you can grapple, it is customized for every hook point! Honestly, why?! This made that mechanic feel very arbitrary, and also make the gameplay feel more scripted/shallow.

Another thing that it's not an issue in the end, but more of something that "pollutes" the gameplay design, is the life mechanic, and therefore the plasma one.
The plasma feels useless after 30 minutes into the game, since you can already get to max life level. They tried to fix this by removing you one life slot after every boss has been defeated, but it's pretty... embarrassing.
Besides, life is just useless in this game, either one hit or the fatal one do the same thing, that is getting you to the closest checkpoint.
This makes the plasma upgrade feel even more useless, since there is no point in having more than 1 slot, apart from losing 2-3 more seconds because of a "U DIED" screen.

I feel like they had something in mind for it but just changed the way the game had to be played (less combat, more exploration, maybe), but then would have had to remove the plasma entirely from the game, which serves as a sort of exploration reward and guidance (since plasma drops form a sort of path).

The boost mechanic was also a bit "annoying".
It has a cooldown, so you can't spam it, and this helps in making the bosses harder and honestly is not a bad idea.
But I constantly found myself wanting to just boost right after I made the previous one, and felt like the game was sort of unresponsive because of that, even though it was intentional.

As last, more of a missed opportunity than anything, I think they could have made more sections like the one near the end of the lava level, where there were monsters preventing you to climb and clear the anomalies, and therefore you had to first clear them to go on.
The combat with these enemies in the game is 99% sort of pointless and just serves as a way to add a bit of thrill. Overall, it works and could be fine as it is, but after playing that section I felt like I would have appreciated some other ones throughout the game.

When something is missing

I may sound harsh, but after all, I liked this game.
It was entertaining, it combines well relaxing/chilling exploration with epic/fast platform bosses, the exploration feels good and there are lots of nice views, and everything is accompanied by an overall good soundtrack.
When I completed it, I felt like I would have appreciated 1-2 more areas, and this means I was really enjoying my time with it.
The real issue is the narrative, which is weak and somehow manages to make everything feel less than it would, like sort of ruining the atmosphere.

I don't know if it is just that or something else, but if I should give a quick opinion about Solar Ash, I would say that it's a good game, but always feels like it's missing something.

I don't understand what the hell is going on with this game. A game all based on speed and fluid motion should never stop, but Solar Ash only stops. Both the fragility of the character and the design of the boss "fights" makes the tiniest of errors a lead to deaths, so most of the time the game is me going from the last checkpoint to where I was before. This is most egregious during the boss events which require to essentially memorise a series of keypresses. There's absolutely no way of beating a boss other than to try and die several times until you repeated the same maneuvers in order so many times that becomes second nature and turns what should be exiting, fast-paced movement into a boring chore.

It doesnt help that the controls are not at all tight. Your character mostly slip through the world and jumping is imprecise. I never feel like I'm fully in control able to perform cool platforming movements because I'm more busy frantically trying to correct my fall as I go from one rail to another because they are positioned too close for the length of the jump.

On top of that, traversal is just not that interesting. Is impossible not to compare this to The Pathless. Whereas in that game movement itself was the gameplay, as you gained speed by actively shooting targets, here it's just "press RT to go brrrrr".

Some of it can be patched out, i think. The issue with the lack of flow can be ameliorated by being more lenient with timing so that you don't need pixel perfect jumps to advance, and by removing deaths during boss events so that you don't die and go back to checkpoint and instead you're just fall to the ground and get to try again instantly. The issue with the uninteresting traversal, not so much. That's really a core design issue.