Striking visual style. As I progressed the art style lacked variety in each new area. It wasn’t until I got to the dark mushroom land that it felt distinctly different and by that point, I’d tired of the gameplay to keep playing.

The mix of speedy and fluid movement of Jet Set combined with Shadow of the Colossus boss fights sounds like a match made in heaven, but I found it to be a bit of a drag to play. The movement for one needed a break up in tedium. Maybe a button press would make you do different dance moves idk. Something to keep movement interesting to watch. I hated backtracking if you fell off any platform. Usually there was only one way up, leading to substantial treks back to the shortcut rail up the building.

The combat was one-note and felt kinda spammy. The animations were great though.

The boss fights were a mix of light platforming and clicking a button when you’re within range of an attack spot to zip to that point. It just felt like it played itself. Wasn’t challenging enough for my liking. I was hoping for more of the puzzle platformer feel of SotC where you find their weak point.

I enjoyed the story and the conversations with the void god, but I found the voice logs that pertain to one member of your crew per new area to be lacking. A lot of the voice acting for the side characters was melodramatic and it played out the same way each time (finding the place of their death).

The ethereal music was fine. Nothing notable. Where this game excelled was in animations. Everything was fluid and beautiful. Killing each colossus was brilliant to watch.

I really wanted to love this game, but there just wasn’t enough to keep me hooked. If you want an easier platforming game, with simple combat, and a thought-provoking story, I think you’ll like this one. I was just expecting a bit more depth.

I've had Solar Ash sitting here installed on my xbox for probably... 2 years? Even though I liked the look of it, I didn't feel motivated to play it, as it's a sequel (? prequel?) to Hyper Light Drifter. I also liked the look of HLD, but it was an absolute snooze to play... And yet I was idly sifting through my installed games, saw this, and looked it up on HowLongToBeat. Yes, I'll play a 6 hour game!

If I had known that this was essentially Shadow of the Colossus + Outer Wilds + Rail grinding, I wouldn't have taken this long to try it. That's a recipe for Larry bait! You put that shit under a cardboard box being held up by a stick, and I'm gonna be trapped within 20 seconds!

The gameplay loop is pretty simple: You wander around little hubs, destroying goop by hitting weak points in quick succession, and each one killed reveals a weak point on a big monster roaming around the area. Once you've killed all the goops, you can kill the colossus. You grapple onto them and do the same thing, hitting the designated spots on the way to their main weak point, and if you're too slow you have to restart. On occasion this can be frustrating, mostly due to the camera whipping around like a maniac while zoomed out about 400 miles away from your character. It usually works fine. You don't have much wiggle room in most cases, but there's no real penalty for getting knocked off, as areas are full of health pickups. There are also small enemies scattered around, which are never more than minor annoyances. This is fine, I guess, as it avoids the Prince of Persia Problem™ for the most part.

A really weird mechanic that I don't quite understand is how you pick up Plasma throughout the game, which is used to increase your max health. Your max health also decreases by 1 every time you beat a colossus, for story reasons. By the halfway point, I had a huge stock of plasma so after every boss I just had to top up to max health again. It's kinda just strange busywork, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. It would make sense if you could use the plasma to upgrade other abilities or something, but nah, just max health. Alright.

Anyway, if you're doing to do a riff on SotC it's important to nail the Vibes. Solar Ash got it. While it doesn't feature the same desperate loneliness and total lack of anything approaching humanity as SotC, it's much more similar to a Souls game. Your character is part of a crew that was sent to collapse a black hole that's threatening a nearby planet, and everyone here is either dead or insane. Interactions with NPCs range from tragic to darkly comic, but all of them are pitiable in their own ways. The end "twist" can be seen coming from about... 5 minutes into the game, but who cares, it all looks cool.

8/10

I would say that this has me looking forward to Hyper Light Breaker, but upon further research I have found that it is apparently going to be a roguelike. So, uh... I'll always have Solar Ash.