Review: Solar Ash Busts a Stylish Move but Its Narrative Is Skimpy at Best

For all of its sense of genuine, thrilling speed in its mechanics, Solar Ash fails to muster any sense of accompanying narrative momentum.

Solar Ash
Photo: Annapurna Interactive

Even a passing familiarity with video game conventions is enough to ensure that you’ll know what to expect from Solar Ash, the second game from the makers of Hyper Light Drifter. The giant stab-able eyeballs, colossal boss monsters, and oodles of bad black ooze are all but self-explanatory, even without the rote sci-fi lore and proper nouns tying it all together. You play Rei, who’s part of a team of Voidrunners sent into a black hole called the Ultravoid to activate the Starseed that will keep their home planet from being swallowed up. As Rei awakens, though, she realizes that there’s not much of a “they” anymore, as she’s seemingly the only Voidrunner left, all alone except for one of those AI companion characters who makes reference to “logic circuits” and has trouble understanding colloquialisms.

The inscrutable nature of the Ultravoid manifests as a lot of floating platforms and winding paths twisted by gravity, taking Rei along walls and ceilings to new areas that let players observe the landmasses that they just navigated a few minutes prior from dizzying new angles. The environments may be little more than video games’ standard-issue wreckage of civilization, but Solar Ash’s later areas in particular are striking to behold, spread out across a sea of strange blue clouds that Rei can move across just like solid ground.

Similar to the equally pretty and derivative The Pathless, Solar Ash somewhat distracts from its most laughably trite elements with a propulsive, invigorating system of movement. Where the gravitational quirks of the level design recall the Super Mario Galaxy games, the clearest antecedent for Rei effortlessly bounding through the ruined world is the Sonic the Hedgehog series and its emphasis on speed. But where those games and many action games in general opt to let characters perform their most complex actions in moments of minimal control that might as well be on autopilot (if they’re not done entirely in cutscenes), Solar Ash locates a middle ground to ably split the difference between pure velocity and player control.

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By default, you hold down the trigger to pick up speed and begin skating across the landscape or grind on rails, making occasional use of a boost that creates additional momentum to send you sailing off ledges and into the distance. Combined with a double jump and a grappling hook that you can aim at enemies in slow motion, the world of Solar Ash is always fluid and satisfying, even when you’ve fallen down because you’ve mistimed a jump.

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The game is acutely aware that movement is its strength, as the ooze-encrusted eyeballs you must destroy to progress are always confronted in miniature time trials where you have to skate, climb, and jump around an area while swatting at weak points that lead to a final finishing blow. Boss battles function the same way, albeit in much more cinematic fashion as you platform across the skin of a giant monster that patrols the area.

Platformers figure heavily into Solar Ash’s DNA, but the game takes a surprisingly restrained approach to the genre’s typical collect-a-thon design. The deposits of plasma you may find are only good for repairing your shield, and you only need to stop and look around the environment for some hidden nook when you spot the glowing sigil that signals a nearby Voidrunner cache. In one sense, this approach frees you from needing to always be on guard to grab some arcane collectible that you might need later. But it also reinforces the feeling that there’s not very much to see in this world—that it’s pretty but ultimately flavorless.

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That emptiness only becomes harder to ignore when the story foregrounds itself, pulling you back for chats with your AI partner or scattering insipid post-apocalyptic lore documents all over the levels. For all of Solar Ash’s sense of genuine, thrilling speed in its mechanics, the game fails to muster any sense of accompanying narrative momentum, content to warm over imagery and ideas from Anno Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shadow of the Colossus, and countless media inspired by each. Solar Ash reaches for awe and splendor somewhere beyond its overall poverty of imagination, succeeding occasionally yet also suggesting that the wordless storytelling of Hyper Light Drifter had been the right way to go.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Heart Machine  Publisher: Annapurna Interactive  Platform: PC  Release Date: December 2, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Fantasy Violence

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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