games of 2021, mini reviews: Solar Ash (Patreon)

Hello! This is brandon. I had to do a bunch of small "reviews" of games for various competitions I was judging for the games of 2021, and I thought I could share them here as a little extra something. They're not written for prose or with much intention, nor are the games very intentionally selected - these are simply the games I had to play for competitions, and the things I had to say about them in that context. I've got 9 of these. I guess I'll post one per week, or whenever I remember. With that in mind, here's Solar Ash, following the form we were using for deeper dives into games for this particular competition:


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Deep Dive – Solar Ash

What is it?

Solar Ash is a 3D action game that tries to blend the skating/blading movement of a game like jet set radio with light combat and heavy-ish platforming and big boss battles, by the creators of Hyperlight Drifter. If I were to pitch it myself, I'd pitch it as jet set radio meets shadow of the colossus. 

Why did I choose it?

Curious to pay the new Heart Machine game, really.

What is it like to play?

You hold LT to skate around, which feels nice. You can boost with RT, jump with X, attack with square, and tether to things with R1. The game feels good when you're moving fast, sliding past enemies and dispatching them, jumping in the cloudy substance that makes up the ground and bouncing around in it. Feels good to grind on rails and leap great heights and all that (most of the time). But Solar Ash suffers from the "3D Sonic problem." That is to say, it feels great when you're going fast, but everything is set up to stop you doing that. 

Basically, a lot of the platforming stops your speed cold, OR you have to be an absolute expert. Either you carefully measure your jumps, or you risk falling. In this game there is a LOT of climbing up to a tall thing, then completing something complex up there, and if you fall along the way you've got to climb all the way back up again. This happened to me a lot, and I didn't have a sense of accomplishment once done, only relief.

The "complicated thing" you have to do is usually hitting these injection nodes that nullify this slime stuff that's all over the place. Some of the slime hurts you to climb on, but then you get a suit that makes it okay (but that's not clear, it took me a while to realize). Climbing on this stuff is fiddly and finicky and gets you stuck in weird places sometimes. Anyway, the main thing it does is slow you down, and you have to hit multiple injection nodes on this slime in order to hit an eye, which then opens an eye on the big boss that's in the area. Hit enough eyes and you get to fight the boss. It's a neat idea! But in practice it is also frustrating. Once you hit the first injection node you have a limited amount of time before you have to hit the next one, usually located some distance away, across platforming and climbing challenges. If you take too long, the slime kicks you off, and sometimes you fall way down to where you started. Either that or it just resets. You basically have to trial and error the path the game wants you to take, which is not that fun unless you get it the first time.

I think one of the biggest issues is with the tether ability. They don't want you to be able to tether to everything, so there are injection nodes you can tether to, and others you can't. There are some enemies you can tether to, and others you can't, and you have to remember which. So if you're hoping to zip across to somewhere, well, that enemy you're targeting had better be the right type. This is especially frustrating in the boss battles.

The boss battles are cool in general, and that's where the shadow of the colossus comes in. You have to run across these giant armored creatures and hit injection nodes upon them, before hitting a big blob in their brain to damage them. You do this 3 times, with a different path each time, and often fewer armor plates. You can't hit their gooey body (even if you have the "goo is okay" suit) or you get knocked off and have to climb back up on them again and start that route over. 

So you're hitting injection nodes as before, but you have to be constantly running, more or less. And there are some nodes you can tether/zip to, and others you can't. I'd say about 50% of my deaths/falls were due to mistaking these (the only visual difference is one has a little circle around it when it's in the right part of the camera - it doesn't ALWAYS look different which means you need to focus on it, and if you're wrong, oops!). Meanwhile, it was clearly a challenge for the team to get the view right all the time while you're clambering all over this beast, up and down and to the side of it. So the camera must constantly be adjusted manually or else you'll miss a node, because they're semi-transparent, making it tough to see where they're actually located in 3D space.

There are audio logs and pieces of new suits to collect, there's a minor upgrade system (mostly just your shields which constantly deteriorate), and a story about saving or destroying a ruined planet, and whether you're the savior or its damnation (the latter is strongly hinted, obviously). I can't say the story grabbed me, and I did turn the voices off because there were too many attempted "accents" in there. 

Do I think it's a contender for GOTY?

No. It saddens me to say it but it's too floppy and loose and "learn the route"-based for me to feel like it's really in there. I would probably have a great time watching a speedrunner who's really good at it beat the game. But even though I'm halfway through I really don't want to go back to it. Others may feel differently!! I know some reviewers really liked it. But for me the barriers to speed left me frustrated, and surmounting those barriers did not leave me satisfied, which to me speaks to something being wrong at the core of the experience.
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one thing I didn't mention in the above is how much I liked the character's dithered cape. it's neat.