How do you make the transition? How do you go from one format to another without sacrificing the key components that made the original formula so well acclaimed? This idea of transitioning for video games was especially true during the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 era. When games were starting to move from the 2D realm to the 3D realm. Developers were no longer limited to four directions or a flat plane, and could allow their characters to go in every direction possible while also changing the way the player viewed that direction as in-game cameras allowed them to change how they were shot. The transition from 2D to 3D was big for the industry. It’s not as big now as every video game uses 3D models and assets, but it was back then as the leap forward was huge. From Super Mario Bros to Super Mario 64. These games found a way to carry their core principles over and still allow them to work for the next generation audience. For every console generation there’s a new audience, and their view on games will be different from the previous audience. However, you still have to consider the past audience, so you try to appease the new crowd while also maintaining the old crowd.
Do you see where I’m trying to go with this? Making the transition is difficult and it takes a lot of consideration before you make the big leap. Now, how can there still be transitioning today when every big video game developer works with 3D processing technology. Indie developers. Yep, it’s always indie developers for me and will forever be. There are some indie devs who start out in the 2D realm. Using a flat plane, pixel or animated graphics, the simple stuff. As their next big project rolls around they try to advance forward, and some of these indie devs go the more expensive route. They want to demonstrate what they are capable of and instead try to make a game that can hold up to the Triple A behemoths out there. Much like Nintendo making the leap from the Super Nintendo to Nintendo 64, these indie devs went from the second dimension all to the third dimension. A good example would be Risk of Rain 2. The first game was a roguelike where you navigated small open ended areas in a 2D space, whereas the sequel would become a third person shooter. However, it didn’t sacrifice the elements that made Risk of Rain work. The unique character classes, locating the teleporter in each area, and collecting a handful of power ups so that those annoying enemies ganging up on you can be cut down in five seconds tops.
That’s an example of making the transition work. Putting full consideration into what must carry on to the next dimension. This brings us to today’s topic. Heart Machine, a small studio founded by Alex Preston who is someone I have a lot of respect towards. He was born with congenital heart disease, which basically messes up how the human heart works and at any moment he can die. He doesn’t know when he’ll die which makes it much scarier. One night he could be alive, and the next morning he couldn't wake up. This should have put a lot of stress onto his life, but he stayed optimistic and tried living life to the fullest. One of his dreams was to make a video game inspired by the ones he played growing up. He established his own studio Heart Machine, named after his disease, and with time it grew in size. Their first project was Hyper Light Drifter, inspired by the classic adventure games of old, and their main goal was to take the player on a journey. Let them venture through a desolate world recovering from an apocalyptic event, but was full of beauty and gave them hope. They also wanted to show how Preston and people like him had to deal with a life threatening disease and push forward despite it holding them back. Thus the main character had a disease that made them cough up blood, and the difficulty was steep to demonstrate the struggles the character had to face. Hyper Light Drifter came out in 2016 and it was masterful. It wasn’t popular, highly acclaimed from the press, and other indie releases from the year overshadowed it, but I would say it’s one of the most important games of that year. The world was well designed, the story was intricately presented, it was tough yet fair, and other aspects like the art direction and soundtrack made it wondrous to explore the destroyed world. Hyper Light Drifter to me is art, and what Heart Machine achieved was brilliant. It’s a masterpiece and the gold standard of how to make an adventure game.
This then brings us to Solar Ash, the team’s next big project after Hyper Light Drifter. When the game was first revealed it almost looked like a successor to Hyper Light Drifter, but in a different realm. It took place in a desolate world formed after a set of disastrous events, had a similar color palette and art direction, and the tone felt similar. What separated Solar Ash apart was that it was in a 3D space and would have narrative told out aloud rather than use the visual storytelling and world building that Hyper Light Drifter used. A little bit of skepticism from me, but I was hopeful for what Heart Machine had in store next. A couple delays pushed the game back to release in 2021, but eventually it came out and we got to see if Solar Ash would live up to the high standards Hyper Light Drifter set. Did the game live up? Well Solar Ash was certainly good and another triumph for the team. I had a fun time with it and will say right now that this is an easy recommendation. However, it didn’t live up to the high standards of Hyper Light Drifter. Despite it being more technologically advanced and having a more comprehensive story, it lost some of the elements that made Drifter work. Not saying it’s a successor to Drifter entirely as of right now they are making a direct sequel called Hyper Light Breaker. Yet, the similarities can be drawn and you can see what had to be ditched during the development process. The standards set by Hyper Light Drifter made Solar Ash a little bit disappointing, but I still think it’s great. Today we’ll be talking about why I kinda liked Solar Ash and why it may deserve your attention.
Story
The Ultravoid is this giant all consuming black hole roaming around the universe. Discovering nearby planets and tearing them to shreds. Killing all life that lived on those planets. Taking what ruins are left and letting it drift around in this open space. Symbolizing the destruction it caused and what lies afterwards. Nothing, this field of nothing. Many feel threatened by the Ultravoid, and action must be taken so that more innocent lives aren’t purged from existence. Luckily, an elite team of explorers known as the Voidrunners were sent into the Ultravoid to finally deal with it. Their home planet is about to meet destruction and they are the ones destined to save it. At the center of the void lies a structure that when activated will destroy the Ultravoid. The Voidrunners planned to use it, but something happened amidst their duty. The Voidrunners were whipped out and the structure laid there at the center of the void.
You play as Rei, one of the surviving Voidrunners, and you awaken after the cataclysmic events. You find yourself near the structure, the technological spire, which your team planned to use but find it out of order. Monsters are roaming about and there’s this weird black substance. They seem to have come from the Ultravoid and anything they make contact with is harmed. There’s also the goliath void creatures in each area and they seem to hold the power needed to restore the spire and activate it. So it’s to Rei to slay these giant beings, restore the spire, and prevent her homeworld from being torn apart. However, there’s this godly being who keeps speaking to her in her dreams. She warns Rei not to activate the spire or there will be consequences. Rei tells the being she doesn’t want to be her enemy, but the being is angered nonetheless. What will happen is something we don’t know, but we must prevent the inevitable.
Gameplay
Unlike Hyper Light Drifter (you know what I'm getting sick of saying the full name so let's just say HLD) which revolved more around exploring the world and choosing what path to go down next, Solar Ash is more focused on a repeated gameplay loop. You are dumped into an area, have to destroy these corrupted eyeballs littered around a small sandbox, and fight the colossal monsters that appear once all of the eyeballs are destroyed. Imagine a collectathon platformer meets Shadow of The Colossus. Do specific things to trigger a boss fight where you scale the beast’s body to destroy it. The eyeballs located around each area will always be out of reach, so the challenge before a boss fight is not how you survive enemy encounters while exploring but rather how you get to your goal. Luckily, Rei can skate and jump around the environment with ease to get to these focal points. Skating can be performed by just holding down the left trigger . Turning is performed by tilting the left joystick left and right, and if you want to take things slowly you can stop skating and just simply walk. Walking is always an option and it can help with those smaller yet tighter platforming sections. Rei can also double jump and use a grappling hook to zip right over to certain spots.
The areas you are dumped in are quite big, and what I like is that each eyeball you have to eliminate can be tackled in any order. If one puzzle or challenge is too difficult to you then you can move onto another one and come back later when you understand the mechanics more and know exactly what to do. None of these challenges will require certain gear, upgrades, or pick ups as Solar Ash never gives you new equipment. It’s just your basic movement and starting gear, and that’s completely it. Same ideology as HLD where you can unlock gear upgrades and new abilities, but none of them are required to actually beat the game and you can get pretty far using the starting pistol and dodge. Another game I want to compare Solar Ash to is The Pathless which we reviewed recently on this site. Both of them follow a similar formula and gameplay loop. Collect things, go to specific points to progress the main objective, and then trigger the colossal boss fights which you must defeat. Where it differs is that in The Pathless you always had to be on the move as a darkening storm is searching for the player, whereas in Solar Ash you can take your time and there’s no punishment.
There is some combat to Solar Ash, but it’s nothing really big. In fact, it’s more shallow than HLD’s combat as all you have to do is mash the attack button and jet around basic enemies to avoid their attacks. None of it is really challenging and if you do take damage then you can smash a health container to refill on health. They are easy to spot and littered around the world. If you do die you respawn at a nearby checkpoint, but there’s a ton of those as well and you don’t lose that much progress from dying. You usually just respawn with one hit point, which can be easily recovered from. You can also collect this pink substance which is also littered about. This substance can come in the form of floating gel or these crystals you have to smash. They can be given to Cyd, your AI partner, and used to restore your max health.
Anyways, you’ll eventually destroy all the eyeballs and trigger the boss confrontations. They’ll be roaming around the center of an area and you have to figure out how to get onto them. Sometimes you have to zip over to the limb you can latch onto, and other times you have to wait for them to attack which then opens up the spot you are supposed to get onto. Once you get on then you must scale their body for a weak point. You must hit these glowing points so that their bodies molten up and burn you, and eventually make way to the weak point to strike. Do this three successful times and the colossus goes down. Besides that there’s not much else to talk about. Just a simple gameplay loop you repeat up until the end. It’s effective, fun, and doesn’t get boring in the slightest. Hopefully, Rei can prevent... the end of the world.
Thought
I had a good time with Solar Ash. I want to talk more about why I and many others alike didn’t like it as much as HLD, but for right now let’s just discuss what this game does right. The core gameplay is fantastic and well designed. The movement is slick, satisfying to control, and is pure fun to just jet around the environment with. It is easy to make mistakes, bump into walls, or fall off the edge and farther away from where you were trying to get to. However, no mistake is too big. You are always offered shortcuts to get back to where you were going. The vast amounts of checkpoints allows you to respawn close to where you die. Healing containers are offered in plentiful amounts, and any mistakes are usually your own fault. The game is never unfair when it comes to difficulty and soon you’ll pick up the movement with ease. The main gameplay loop is fun and never gets annoying. It’s easy to see where you have to go next as the eyeballs you have to destroy are usually located at easy to spot peculiar landmarks, and if there's a detector you can activate to pin the next points you have to go to. The bosses are fun to fight and some revolve around unique mechanics. Much like The Pathless, Solar Ash is a worthy successor to Shadow of The Colossus and provides thrilling moments for taking on a monster several times larger than you.
The art direction is great, but that’s to be expected of Heart Machine. The world and characters are designed in such a way where they make sense, but are unlike anything of our world. They have this weirdness to them, but not so weird that they don’t belong to the universe. They went crazier with the world of Solar Ash by having this skybox with ruins sprouting towards different directions. The colors are vibrant, neon lit, and bizarre much like HLD. There’s a heavier usage of pink and several other shades of pink in Solar Ash, but they managed to make it look really nice. I still like the world and colors of HLD more, but I cannot deny that Solar Ash looks really good especially for Heart Machine’s first attempt at a 3D world. It reminds me of Steven Universe, and that I don’t even know if that’s a good complement.
Now we move onto some of my criticisms with Solar Ash. Nothing that makes it terrible, but not as noteworthy as HLD. I think the story of Solar Ash is easier to comprehend than HLD due to the game having voiced characters and telling the player what is going on through dialogue, but I don’t believe the story is as great or interestingly presented. What made the story of HLD work is that it was done through visual presentation. There was no dialogue at all and any reading was usually done in a made up language consisting of symbols. Cutscenes were brief and usually gave a clue of what to expect, but not an entire picture. This gave HLD a sense of wonder and mystery. Allowing the player to piece together by themselves what was going on. It wasn’t a full narrative and I wouldn’t say it was fantastic, but it was a good narrative elevated by the way it allowed the player to think. Sadly, Solar Ash does not have this element and to some degree eliminates the sense of mystery the world of HLD had. Sure, Solar Ash is more comprehensible but it loses the satisfaction found from seeing events unfold and letting your imagination run wild. It makes uncovering the narrative not as satisfying, and I even found the ending to be kinda bad.
I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say the ending of Solar Ash is satisfying yet predictable. There were events and dialogue scenes leading up to the big twist, and when it finally came it didn’t really have an impact on me. I saw it coming since maybe the third boss and I just went, “Okay.” It’s not a terrible ending and I like how Rei submits to the new world before her, but it didn’t feel as good. Another criticism I have with Solar Ash is that the dialogue is not good. It’s not poorly written, but what is said is expected and at times gets annoying. Connecting back to HLD tells a story through visual presentation, there are some in Solar Ash that don’t need to be said out loud and could have been shown through cinematic moments. I think the voice actors are exceptional though. They did a good job, but I wouldn’t say it’s award worthy acting. It’s acceptable.
My final criticism is that some people might find the game to be too short. It took me around five hours to beat which is a good runtime, and if it were any longer then I would have gotten worn out. However, that’s kinda steep for the forty dollar price tag the game has and I don’t see that many reasons to replay it or explore to find unlockables. There’s these suit fragments you can discover and NPC side quests, but they don’t do much to affect the player. Plus the world isn’t that open. Some areas connect to other ones, but the way you get to them is quite linear. Whereas in HLD once you are done with the tutorial you get to choose one of three paths to go down. One is obviously easier than the other, but you at least have the option to choose where your adventure leads next. To fight an area’s boss you need to activate four beacons, but there are eight beacons hidden around as well as secrets. You can choose not to progress and instead find secret boss fights, clothing, skill points, and weaponry. It gave the player a reason to explore or replay to see what they missed during their playthrough. Solar Ash is a more technological advancement for HLD, but it doesn’t do a great job at carrying out formulas. It made sacrifices that actually harmed the formula, and now I’m worried about Hyper Light Breaker as the devs want it to be a roguelike rather than the adventure game HLD was. Still, Solar Ash is an achievement for Heart Machine and I hope they go to greater places with future titles. In the end I am going to give Solar Ash an 8.5/10 for being pretty good. It’s still a good game despite everything I just complained about, but it’s no Hyper Light Drifter.
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