Solar Ash

I went into Solar Ash expecting Hyper Light Drifter with an extra dimension. What I got was something stranger and more singular: a skating-forward action-platformer built almost entirely around the feeling of staying in motion. You play as Rei, a Voidrunner who has hurled herself into the Ultravoid - a colossal black hole consuming her home planet - to activate a device called the Starseed. Each of the game's six biomes tasks you with hunting down timed anomaly puzzles that unlock a massive Remnant boss, and then doing it all again in the next zone. The loop is simple. On purpose. The movement is the argument. Rei skates across cloud-covered terrain, grinds rails that only materialize after you ferry glowing spores to their nodes, grapples between anchor points, and hits a slow-motion aim mechanic that stitches the whole thing together with surprising precision. A boost function lets you launch off ramps and clear absurd gaps. The game hands you every ability from the start, no unlock tree, no drip-fed progression - which is both freeing and a structural liability, because the lack of new tools means the loop never evolves. What you play in hour one is mechanically identical to what you play in hour seven. Some players will find the repetition meditative. Others will have checked out by the third biome. The boss fights are the peak. Each Remnant is a massive black-goo creature - shapes vaguely recalling snakes, bats, and things harder to name - that you skate across like a much faster Shadow of the Colossus, hitting weak points along the body before time runs out, with the terrain literally shrinking under you on each attempt. One mistake resets the phase. The pressure is real, the spectacle is genuine, and landing the final blow on something the size of a city block never stops feeling good. Standard enemies between bosses are less inspired: most go down in a few slashes and exist mainly as obstacles to your momentum rather than threats. Visually, Solar Ash is difficult to dismiss. The pastel neon palette - blues, pinks, purples shot through with threatening red - gives the Ultravoid a dreamlike identity that holds up across every zone. The synth soundtrack matches the mood, quiet when you are exploring, urgent when the clock starts. Story-wise, the game is more talkative than Hyper Light Drifter, delivering Rei's arc through voiced dialogue, journal logs, and NPC encounters spread across the biomes. The themes - isolation, grief, the weight of being the last hope - land sincerely. The dialogue delivery itself is uneven, and the opening dumps proper nouns on you faster than the game earns them, but stick with it and the emotional underpinning becomes one of the more affecting parts. The whole campaign runs around seven to ten hours depending on how much side content you chase, and there is a speedrun-adjacent completionist trophy for finishing inside three hours. The honest warning: Solar Ash does one thing, and it does that one thing very well. If flowing movement and escalating set-piece bosses sound like enough of a spine for an eight-hour game, this will feel complete. If you need a growing toolkit, meaningful combat, or a world that pushes back in varied ways, the seams show quickly. PC performance has also drawn complaints about frame drops in a game where speed is everything - worth keeping in mind.

Alex · Scout Team

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