Solar Ash is Heart Machine’s follow-up to the last game I played, Hyper Light Drifter. Another indie studio might have stuck with what they were successful with, pixel art, vague mysteries and v i b e s… but they instead pivoted to 3d, introduced an actual traditional voiced narrative structure, and built out a much more linear game than HLD.

They kept the vibes, kept the exploration, kept the wonderful movement and fluid combat, but very clearly reprioritized these to put movement absolutely at the top whereas with HLD it was maybe #2. Solar Ash is set within the event horizon of a black hole in a series of environments made up of bits and pieces of worlds the black hole has consumed, broken apart and upended, then reassembled wrong, all resting upon a bed of mist or fog of these worlds ground to dust. The protagonist Rei is part of an expedition trying to collapse or otherwise stop the black hole, which is on a collision course with her home. Your anti-doomsday-device needs charging, so that quest sends you off to the far reaches of the world. Rei’s primary mode of transportation is hard-light rollerblades, so you’ll spend your time dashing through fog, bopping from island to island, grinding on rails, and extending sick jumps with grapples.

Each zone of the game has unique architecture, environmental hazards, movement gimmicks, side-quests and puzzles, but they all follow basically the same formula:

  1. Welcome to the zone. Orient yourself.
  2. Find your Robot Pal.
  3. Scan for Goopy Anomalies.
  4. Murder said Goopy Anomalies.
  5. Murder the giant Remnant.
  6. Hi-five your Robot Pal and proceed to the next zone.

Orienting yourself is often pretty challenging, because as this all takes place within a black hole, gravity is highly variable, and these clouds of dust might curve around and up into the sky and down below and around in spirals, evoking some of the more adventurous levels of Mario Galaxy.

Anomalies and Remnants are the real focus of the game. Anomalies are effectively little environmental puzzles where you have to cleanse an area of Goop that has infected it by stabbing specific points in a quick sequence with giant syringes, typically while skating around at full speed, traversing a tricky environment, dodging enemies and deadly goop, grappling when you need to, etc. Each one is a carefully crafted unique little environmental puzzle, and they’re all pretty wonderfully designed and there’s a great variety of them.

Stabbing each anomaly cleanses its goop from the area, and opens an enormous angry eye on the zone’s Remnant. Opening all four or five of these eyes will awaken the Remnant, leading to a Shadow of the Colossus-style boss fight where you have to grapple onto the body of this kaiju-sized beast roaming the zone and proceed through three phases of a similar but much longer syringe-stabbing environmental puzzle sequence until you finally take it down.

That continues on for five or six zones, with each zone adding its own little complexities like “now there’s radioactive juice everywhere” or “now there’s lava to contend with” or “now the rails are electrified, so you’ll have to disable them before grinding”, but the gameplay stays pretty much the same.

Overall it’s a pretty breezy game, most of the cleansing puzzles were one-shot for me, or were one-shot to understand, then a little bit of beating my head against it to actually execute what I knew I needed to do, and only a very select few were on such tight timing to really frustrate me. The game unfortunately sort of tripped over itself in the last zone, where there were a couple SUPER poorly communicated mechanics that had me running around in circles for a bit. This otherwise wonderful experience was marred a bit further in the final boss fight where I enjoyed some lovely glitches that led to the game turning into Gravity Rush, as I helplessly spun around in space, bumping against an invisible wall… but hey, it got me an achievement for spending more than 10 seconds in mid-air.

Recommended, but Highly Recommended when cheap.