This broad story set-up translates to reaching and clearing out anomalies that are interfering with the conduits, then defeating each area’s colossal boss creature.Īction-platforming is very much the main driver of Solar Ash, but it’s interested in worldbuilding too, and has plenty to dig into via story elements like audio logs left by Rei’s missing teammates, scrawled notes in the environment, a handful of survivors you can talk to, and quizzing Rei’s friendly AI construct Cyd on the details of the mission. These are necessary to power a gigantic, monolithic piece of technology called the Starseed - which, in turn, is the only hope to close the black hole itself and save Rei’s planet from imminent destruction. You are Rei, a Voidrunner who has ventured inside a black hole called The Ultravoid, and you’re trying to find out what happened to each of your companions and ensure the conduits they set up throughout the different sectors of the void are operational.
In Solar Ash you’re faced with platforming challenges, light puzzles, enemy encounters, bosses, and impossible spaces - and you glide your way through it all, accompanied by an appropriately atmospheric, synth-driven sci-fi score. Solar Ash’s vivid colour palette is evocative of developer Heart Machine’s last game, Hyper Light Drifter, but transposed to a 3D open-world, in which momentum is the overriding design principle. Of course, if Solar Ash ends up feeling like a trippy sci-fi extrapolation of Ocarina of Time, it should be a success on all fronts.Rei contemplates the Ultravoid before leaping in. I mostly focused on, how do we feel we're succeeding internally? Rather than, what is the audience going to expect out of that? Or, what kind of score will you get on Metacritic?” “Like any artist, like any creative person, you hate your own work until you don't and then you let it go. “Audience expectation absolutely factors into it, but for me I'm my own worst critic,” Preston said. Preston has established his brand as an innovative, thoughtful developer, and Solar Ash is his chance to defend it - not only in the court of public opinion, but in his own mind. Everyone's done incredible heavy lifting and worn a lot of different hats, as you have to do on this scale of team, for this scale of project.”Īs Heart Machine’s second game, there’s a lot riding on Solar Ash. “Because we have a small team making a big-ass project, and the team has been excellent in carrying through on everything that we could. “For Drifter and for Solar Ash, there are similar threads of really focusing on the core elements that are impactful and getting as much mileage out of those as we possibly can,” Preston said. That’s a bigger dev team than the original Hyper Light Drifter crew, but then again, Solar Ash is a bigger game. There are about 25 people on the Solar Ash team, including Hyper Light Drifter and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, otherwise known as Disasterpeace. Solar Ash is filled with radioactive environments and grotesque enemies, and it's all about fluidity and agility, surfing through the ruins of lost civilizations at the center of a black hole. It doesn’t attempt to do too much, and the team instead has focused on implementing a handful of core mechanics and making them feel as perfect as possible. Solar Ash is an action platformer with Heart Machine’s DNA baked into its code. It's not trying to say ‘I'm a sequel’ or anything like that to Drifter.” but it's its own game, it's its own identity in many ways. I would say that there are connected threads between the games, because I am who I am as a creator, as an artist. So a million galaxies away, technically sure.
“Not like Marvel Cinematic Universe, but literally in a universe. “I did ambiguously say it's in the same universe,” Preston said.
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