
Unlike Heart Machine's last game, the story in Solar Ash is conveyed in no uncertain terms. There are also side-quests involving a handful of characters you meet along the way that help flesh out the state of the world you're exploring. Voidrunner caches you find across the maps unlock various alternate suits that have different abilities like increases damage, shorter ability cooldowns, or the ability to scan for other Voidrunner caches.
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Solar Ash also has a more conventional progression system where you use plasma collected through your journey to upgrade your maximum health. She moves around with style and grace, and dispatches the monsters she encounters with swift sword slashes. Where Team Ico's game had you playing as a bumbling everyman barely holding on for dear life, Rei is an extremely capable and cool warrior. But to put it that way is to grossly undermine what Heart Machine does best - combine their wide range of influences in a ways entire their own that coalesces into something singularly unique.įor one thing, the pacing in Solar Ash differs wildly from Shadow. So it's the fast-paced traversal of The Pathless with the puzzle-ish boss fights of Shadow of the Colossus. The boss battles involve scaling the massive bodies and stabbing their weak spots. Once you do enough of these, the boss is ready to fight.

You enter a new area, solve a bunch of puzzles to clear it of the black sludge plaguing it. You move around using Rei's jet boots to skate around massive levels and grind on rails. The game is segregated into six different biomes each with their own central gimmicks and themes. The core gameplay of Solar Ash involves fast-paced platforming broken up by slower puzzle challenges, punctuating in a show-stopping boss fight. Their previous game Hyper Light Drifter was very much a homage to classic 2D Zelda games, and Solar Ash immediately resembles Team Ico's seminal game Shadow of the Colossus with a little bit of another Annapurna-published puzzle platformer The Pathless - which I guess also had Colossus vibes (clearly there's some kind of unofficial Team Ico revival happening at Annapurna Interactive and I'm here for it). Heart Machine is clearly a studio that wears their influences on their sleeves. Thus begins a somewhat familiar-feeling adventure about slaying massive beasts and saving the world. As she awakes, however, her entire team has vanished and the massive inky beasts stand between her and her goal. Rei's home planet is at risk of being sucked into the Ultravoid (a very large black hole) and it is up to her to activate a device called the Starseed that will save her planet from this fate. Wasting absolutely no time, it places you in the shoes of a voidrunner named Rei, who uses advanced technology to explore black holes. Up until now, neither the developer nor the publisher behind Solar Ash revealed any plans for launching the game on Xbox and Nintendo consoles.Solar Ash begins, as many games do, with its protagonist waking up confused in a strange space.
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The PC version of the game is exclusive to Epic Games Store and it's not hit by a 10% discount for those who pre-order the game just before its launch. Solar Ash will be available for $19.99 on PS4, PS5, and PC.

December 2 at 5 pm UTC/6 pm BST/7 pm CEST.Below, you can check out the exact release time for every major time zone: Solar Ash will be available on December 2 in most regions of the world except for the Eastern Asian countries. Now, if you are excited to play Solar Ash the moment it launches, let's have a look at the game's release time in different time zones as well as its launch price and target platforms. The game was supposed to come out earlier, but the COVID-19 situation forced developers to push back the release date. Solar Ash follows the story of a Voidrunner whose only hope for surviving is to save her homeland from the invasion of Ultravoid.įeaturing a surreal art style, Solar Ash is an action-adventure experience with some unique gameplay mechanics set in dream-like locations of Rei's home planet.Īs an indie game, Solar Ash will be published by Annapurna Interactive in almost 24 hours.
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