I was standing in a floating church late yesterday night when I looked up through the broken ceiling’s bones and saw an island hanging above me. Because the island was oriented downward, I could only see the tops of noble pines and sparse grass where stars should have been. I was curious about how to get there since it was so lovely and playful.
This is Solar Ash, and in essence, this is a skating game. This is an amazing cosmic skating game that demands that you never, ever stop moving. The rinks are breathtaking. You go across this terrain with no resistance; you are just a force of intent and direction. The earth veers off in odd yet intriguing directions. The connection is lenient; even the grind rails have a dreamy, mag-lev quality to them, making it easy to get on and off. The sky is crystal clear, and the earth is often covered in soft, pearly-blue clouds that support you while also allowing you to glimpse, momentarily, as you fall into the murky depths before your speed brings you back to the top. Floating on a cloud: a promising start to the day.
It is logical. The fragmented narrative suggests that the whole thing is situated within a black hole, an ancient mosaic of a tale that will piece itself back together tile by tile if you have the stamina to find the missing bits. You keep skating as space and time perform bizarre black hole effects because there is a lost planet that might yet be salvaged. Schwarzschild Mobius! We are suspended in their reality right now. Thus, you investigate. You battle glowing-eyed alien blob monsters with beaks and mantles made of bone. Quick battles, each resolved in a matter of seconds as you go by, preferably without pausing. battles that seem more like a necessary stop along the way than an interruption.
Bones and beaks! But even in this chaotic environment, order also exists. In Solar Ash, you explore a variety of platforming environments, and to call forth the local beast, you must take out a number of targets in each one. Once it arises, you must demolish it as well since it’s a massive object that resembles a landscape in and of itself. Then, go on to the next scene, where the process repeats with clever variety.
This game’s structure could remind you of The Pathless, a beautiful game about exploration and the exhilarating rush of movement released by Annapurna. In that game, you journeyed from one region to another, doing three of this and four of that to summon a beast that had to be defeated. However, the two games only really share structure. In The Pathless, you have to shoot arrows at dispersed targets in order to continuously gain elastic motion. Its expansive and often audaciously open levels remind me of the type of restricted white-box areas I’ve always thought developers use to try out concepts.
The Pathless is enamored with the basin or valley in terms of level form. On the other hand, Solar Ash like small, intricate areas with twists, turns, and tangles. Christmas trees with skylines of Manhattan. Here, propulsion is like a ready present; it’s only waiting for you to pull the trigger. Instead, you have to concentrate on threading a temple or a collapsed skyscraper, digging clean lines through these intricate areas, dancing from one spar of rock to another, climbing sprays of climbable black goop, conjuring jump pads by smacking junction boxes, and inventing whole new rails by jabbing weird fungal macaroons as you go.
The game’s biggest joys arise when you discover a new location and see the magnificent confusion that lies ahead. These vistas are the essence of Solar Ash. One segment has thirty skyscrapers, towering commercial buildings that you must weave among while dodging the vintage subway cars strewn all over the tracks. The following region may have you bathe in the appropriate kind of alien spores, turn off the lights, and unlock colored-coded doors. Then a poisoned beach, under a sky of twisted threads of cloud, where honeyed ruins rest. It’s a mellow, sun-baked type of 3D art. The stone is cozy, and the mushrooms have a pleasing appearance. Still, however! The area may seem alive, with maybe villi instead of grass under your feet, yet it is also a fantasy where death is flourishing. Landmines that like flu viruses and tell of pointless fights, the beaked creatures you knock about as you go past, the quiet, long-vacated houses rising above and underfoot. Life at its most unsettling, I suppose, with all that fungus too.
The sceneries complement your moveset well. After selecting a direction, use a trigger to start skating. Use rails to hop and grind them. When you need an additional boost of speed, use a rechargeable boost. For difficult intersections, use a restricted slow motion. You may even employ grappling points, or adversaries, to latch on, snap across the terrain, and score a cosmic headshot. Occasionally, it looks as if the daring movements you’re combining shift from your side of the screen to the other. The character you’re directing sometimes bursts into giggles at how absurd the things you’re doing are.
And those animals. You may activate each one by emptying a few animalistic black goop puddles scattered across the game. Actually, it’s more of a navigation problem as you travel between assault sites while the timer counts down. Then, to cap it all off, you stick a needle into the puddle’s fiery pink whale-eye, which is also a monster. When you complete each of them, the terrain becomes somewhat clearer and the enormous beast in the sky gets closer to being conscious. When it finally does wake up, you grab onto it with a game face and skate around its spiky surfaces, which resemble a withering phoenix in one instance and a spider basketball in another. As the world speeds by below you, you judder between new assault spots in progressively difficult waves.
It wouldn’t be difficult to dissect Solar Ash’s complex web of possible influences, from the way your movements evoke the carefree fun of Jet Set Radio to the way the game revels in swiveling the camera and dropping you beneath an object you’ve been studying for the past thirty minutes from an alternate viewpoint, à la Mario Galaxy. And such creatures ought to call forth the most well-known giants in gaming, or at the very least, the bird of sand from Mario Sunshine.
However, they seldom ever do. All these semi-familiar elements are filtered through a deeper set of influences that feel like wholly personal preoccupations; in fact, they feel so personal that I’m not sure they even belong to the game and its designers, or to me, the player, and I’ve just imagined them, which is what I believe makes Solar Ash unique. But I get a glimpse of it—this bigger, deeper game lurking within the well-known one, shifting, expanding inside its boundaries. I get a glimpse of it when the audio transitions from the scorching Icarus heroics of the Vangelis-tinged theme to the alien burble and thud of human homeostasis, or when a twist of rideable cloud arcs up above like a heavily myelinated nerve.
This place seems to have an interior component, don’t you think? Could its adversaries be its organs, lymph nodes, or landmark neuroglia or macrophages? Are these sporadic mushrooms or the scented synapses of neurons about to release their bursts of atomizers?
This takes me to the one irrefutable impact of video games. Hyper Light Drifter’s spiritual follow-up is called Solar Ash. The same team made both games, and although I don’t think the storylines have a perfect connection, they do touch on some of the same vague issues. Between the games, there’s a beautiful flow from secluded 2D to expansive 3D, from jagged pixel art edges and grating stone to rounded hills, gentle clouds, and those globs of viscous alien tar. Both games like the empty, silent moments that add to the excitement of the action when it does come. They both like the outdoors and rocks. They both like painting with a vibrant pallet of colors from Topshop, especially embracing the odd combinations of pink and cyan. These two active games focus on isolation.
I went through Hyper Light Drifter twice, and it wasn’t until the second time that I really understood the amount of personal labor that went into creating this beautiful, accurate, and simple-to-sell product. And heart is most likely the appropriate term. Illness often enters a space accompanied by clouds of metaphor and allusion. It begs to be comprehended. And so you fight a disease. You firmly refuse to let it prevail. Your doctor could just toss the book at it. Hyper Light Drifter seemed to come about as a result of this process of analogizing a little bit; Alx Preston, the creative director of Heart Machine, having contributed to its creation via his personal experience—I believe I recall this—with heart sickness.
The true beauty, power, and privilege of that game, in my opinion, rested in the fact that it allowed me intimate access to a personal metaphor of disease that was not fully understandable from the outside. Naturally, I started to wonder: what came next? Is the metaphor evolving with time?
All of this is to say: Solar Ash could be the game most likely to cause lumbar punctures ever. I’m not sure whether you’ve ever experienced one yourself. Not an attack! Really, it makes sense to add a dozen needles that would puncture your spine directly, because your limbic system is already experiencing Jet Set Radio.
Every boss you face will have you leaping from one spine to the next, over rivers of slime that may be shiny nerve fibers, and from one bone to the next. Furthermore, the attack spots you switch between resemble syringes much too much for this to be a coincidence, right? The body became medical in all its horrific subtlety. As you destroy every needle and proceed, you have a feeling of not just making progress, eliminating another obstacle, and defeating a beast, but also experiencing a more profound and agonizing continuous enlightenment. Is this material true? Does it really matter? I’m inclined to suggest that, for me at least, this is the kind of thing that turned Hyper Light Drifter from a sophisticated and fashionable design element into a really intimate item, a dazzling gem shaped, at least in part, by Preston’s personal experience.
Of course, Solar Ash is ultimately concerned with a constellation of things, some of which are contradictory, just like any other work of art. I like that you are mostly free to draw your own conclusions and interpret things as you see fit. Books on interests, anxieties, and obsessions line these shelves. Read anything you’d want to.
In relation to books. Every time I remember Hyper Light Drifter, I am transported back to a library high in the mountains, its shelves tattered and crumbling, its windows wide open to the piercing wind. A location that will stick in your memory.
Yes, last night I discovered a library here in Solar Ash as well. It’s tucked away in a recess in the ground, off the main route. A room that resembled a dome, with a tree growing through it from above and its roots entangled with the books that were stacked one on top of the other. It must have meant a lot to me because, in a game all about movement, I took a moment to halt and just stand still in order to process it all.