Solar Ash

When Heart Machine released Hyper Light Drifter in 2016, it established a benchmark for atmospheric, 2D pixel-art storytelling. With Solar Ash, released December 8, 2022 at $39.99, the studio hasn’t just added a third dimension; they’ve fundamentally altered the geometry of their ambition. Published by Annapurna Interactive, this high-speed action-platformer swaps the precision-based combat of its predecessor for something far more ethereal and momentum-driven. You play as Rei, a Voidrunner navigating the surreal, gravity-defying landscapes of the Ultravoid—a planet-devouring black hole. Her mission is a desperate attempt to save her home world by activating the Starseed, a cosmic needle designed to stitch reality back together.

From the moment Rei touches the ground, it’s clear that movement is the product. Rather than traditional walking or running, Rei skates across clouds of ash and neon-soaked ruins with a frictionless grace that evokes Jet Set Radio and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The market positioning here is clever: it occupies the space between the contemplative “walking simulator” and the high-intensity character action game. Heart Machine focuses on the visceral sensation of traversal, using it as a primary narrative tool to convey the sheer scale and melancholic beauty of a dying universe. While the transition from 2D to 3D is often fraught with camera and control issues, Solar Ash appears to maintain a level of technical polish, even when the landscapes literally turn upside down. It is a game that prioritizes vibe and velocity over traditional mechanical complexity, carving out a niche for players who want to thread a needle through a dying cosmos.

• Kinetic Traversal System: A fluid “skating” mechanic that allows for effortless movement across clouds, rails, and vertical surfaces, emphasizing momentum and rhythm.
• Sentinels: Colossal, planet-sized bosses that serve as living platforming levels, requiring the player to scale their bodies at high speeds to strike weak points.
• The Ultravoid: A surreal, neon-drenched open world featuring non-Euclidean geometry and gravity-flipping environments that challenge spatial perception.

The core of Solar Ash is not found in its combat or its menus, but in the mechanical friction—or lack thereof—between the player and the world. The game is built around a “flow state.” Navigating the Ultravoid requires a constant balancing act of grappling, grinding, and boosting. Heart Machine has tuned the controls with an eye for responsiveness, aiming for a Rei who feels light but never out of control. When a rail grind chains into a grapple-point launch and lands on a cloud of ash, the design is doing exactly what it set out to do.

The Loop and Its Limitations

However, the strength of the movement eventually runs into the reality of the gameplay loop. Each biome follows a predictable cadence: arrive, explore, clear a series of “corrupted anomalies” under a time limit, and then face the area’s Sentinel. The anomaly-clearing is essentially a high-speed time trial, forcing you to hit specific nodes in a sequence. While this reinforces mastery of movement, it can become repetitive by the third or fourth region. The “onboarding friction” is low, but the variety doesn’t always scale with the environment’s complexity. You are doing the same thing in a different neon-colored sandbox, and while that thing is inherently fun, the lack of mechanical evolution over the game’s runtime is a notable oversight.

Scaling the Giants

The true highlights are the Sentinels. These encounters are clearly inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, but they operate at a much higher tempo. Scaling these gargantuan beasts is a high-stakes race against time and gravity. Fighting a boss here means platforming on a moving, living mountain. These moments represent the peak of the game’s design, where the scale of the environment and the speed of the character harmonize. The minimalist combat—a simple one-button strike—is clearly designed to stay out of the way of the movement. It’s effective, but it lacks the depth found in Heart Machine’s previous work, which may leave some fans of Hyper Light Drifter feeling undernourished.

Narrative Weight

The story is one of melancholic determination. It doesn’t beat you over the head with exposition; instead, it lets the environments and the haunting soundtrack do the heavy lifting. Rei’s interactions with the remnants of the Ultravoid’s previous victims add a layer of tragic world-building that rewards exploration. It’s a story about the cost of salvation and the weight of loss, and while it doesn’t always land its emotional beats with the same precision as its platforming, it provides a sufficient “why” for the “how” of the gameplay.

Visually, Solar Ash is a case study in art direction over raw graphical power. The color palette is aggressive and unapologetic—purples, teals, and hot pinks that shouldn’t work together but somehow create a coherent, dreamlike atmosphere. The UI design is sparse and elegant, keeping the focus on the world rather than the HUD. The game’s design depends on steady performance—frame drops would break momentum—so the stylized, lightweight presentation is a sensible choice for a title of this scope. The sense of scale is perhaps its greatest visual achievement; looking up and seeing a massive structure that you’ll eventually skate on creates a persistent sense of awe.

On Steam, the platform supports high frame rates and precise mouse/keyboard mapping, though a controller is highly recommended for the analog movement. The PC version allows the neon aesthetics to pop with higher resolution and better post-processing. On Nintendo Switch, the trade-off is portability versus fidelity; a handheld version of a game this fast-moving inevitably involves compromises in resolution and visual crispness. The stylized art style is well suited to masking such limitations, making it a reasonable “on-the-go” option for those who don’t mind a slight hit to image quality.

Solar Ash is a daring evolution for Heart Machine. By stripping away the dense combat of the past and focusing entirely on the physics of the soul, they have created something distinctly kinetic. It is a game of soaring highs and repetitive plateaus. While the core loop eventually reveals its predictable skeleton, the joy of movement and the scale of its boss encounters carry the experience. It doesn’t reach the legendary status of the titles it draws inspiration from, but it remains a bold and beautiful piece of work that earns a recommendation for players drawn to its sense of scale and speed—and only them.