Heavily advertised as stylish, fluid, fancy, but at least the first hour plays like an empty-feeling open world that's also tricky to navigate to the point of needing quest marker vision. It feels really all over the place because it's weirdly uneven: the UI splash transitions are incredibly polished, but then the UI text is so tiny it's hard to read on my TV.

There's character banter/many popups used to bandaid over poorly communicated design (slowing time down lets you grapple farther?? stepping on some black goo starts timers?). I'm not one to be against weird controls but they don't seem intentionally weird, rather just miscalculations or like quick-patch-up-fixes.

The strange semi-diegetic dialogue ("I can grapple farther by pressing A!" or "Oh no not another enemy!") feel a lot like AAA games like an Uncharted or something.

I, of course, love narrative in games, but it's a balance that needs to be considered, not dropped in. Sometimes narrative can merely be a bandaid over a game world having trouble communicating narrative-feeling-elements through its game design.


now, the movement...

The level design weirdly pulls you into these momentum-stopping things: climbing on walls Assassin's Creed style, overly straightforward 3D combat with a weirdly punishing health system. Sometimes the level ideas are kind of dense and compact - not a bad thing on its own, but the movement wants to be about speed and long jumps! The level ideas sometimes feel like little skate parks, but the movement isn't built quite right to take advantage of these levels. And ultimately skating games are about a different avenue of expression (the tricks, reading the walls/floors/slopes/rails for the corresponding wallslides/manuals/tricks/grinding).

I think what Solar ash's movement fits better into is something like those CS surfing maps, 3D sonic, etc.

So there seems to be a base-level conflict between Level Design Direction and Moveset, and even conflicts within Moveset itself.

That's not to say there aren't any moments where the level design works (at least after an hour) but it tends to be more in fragments. I can see moments where stuff shines, but then I'm climbing on a goo wall again or 3-hit-comboing an enemy.

The "speedrun a course to clear it" idea is interesting. I think that you have to get checkpoints to extend the timer is great. But at the same time the checkpoints being precise things you have to hit, kind of feels like it restricts the level design expression even more - it almost makes the levels feel kind of 'automatic'? Think about the mario 64 yoshi race - it's essentially a timed challenge, but it's still left up to you how to make your way up the mountain. Should you take the bridge or long jump it? Run around the balls or not?

And it's not like getting checkpoints to extend a timer is no good, but the fact the time extends are so precise and attention-focusing feels off.

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But, there also feels like a feel-conflict between the way you are supposed to move fast and then sometimes stop or move precisely to slash stuff. It makes me think to Sonic Adventure - the reason your homing attack, well, homes, isn't a mistake - it's because they wanted to add simple combat for texture but also let you maintain a relative level of speed. Imagine if Sonic had to stop to punch the enemies instead of just bopping them in a row! Solar Ash's combat admittedly is fast, but it's still a strange context switch.

I also think the affordance of the dash button feels mushy - you're already moving quite fast to start, so a button to make you move faster feels like it mostly leads to something like making it harder to read distances in the level geometry gaps. (Compare this to the way that the walk vs run feel a lot more clearly distinguished). Going from fast to faster can work in some contexts, but to me it's better as a puzzly mechanic. I think a "go from fast to faster" mechanic makes more sense in a racing game where the focus is micro-optimizations, but in something like Solar Ash it kind of muddies up making jumps /grinds/grapples .


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There's also the health system which seems to be symbolic on the surface but feels like a way to justify having little plasma cells to collect and grind. And that it's tied into combat makes it not stick the landing even more - if the combat feels flat, then a health system tied to it probably can't carry much narrative weight. I love the idea of having symbolic systems in the games (heart machine? plasma?) but it seems tied to the wrong system here.

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Lastly the first boss battle: I know it's taking inspo from Shadow of the Colossus but this game lacks the gravitas of its implementation. SotC works because you're slow and puny, tiny and have a horrible time trying to cling on to the giant colossus thing. There's no friction getting on or off the boss in Solar Ash - completing a hit weirdly respawns you on the ground, ready to get back on - an easy grapple away. If it's easy to get on then it doesn't feel that tense being on it. SotC might have easy moments when stepping on the colossus, but those are exaggerated into sheer tension because you may have had to do something tedious to get on the colossus.

In Solar Ash, punctuating moments of speed with a full stop (the hit) feels odd to me. It's not to say it doesn't feel a little cool running on a serpent, but like I mentioned with the time extends earlier - the fact that 'hurting the boss' is so strictly signposts serves to exaggerate the Mario Boss/Zelda-Puzzle quality of fighting them, shifting the focus from movement/speed into following a trail to the next clearly marked thing to slash open.

Boss fights in platformers are always tricky. I'm not even sure I'm convinced that 3d platformers should have boss fights - at least not in the 'use flimsy combat to hit an enemy 3 times' - perhaps something else entirely should be in their place in terms of emotional climaxes.

Or idk, maybe it could be a race. Race 3 people to the death, but one of them is your friend! A melodramatic dialogue takes place as you lap them, reaching the finish line before them...
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This is a pretty harsh review overall, but both 3D platformers and action games are important to me and I think it's important to talk about why games' designs fail! And it does bother me that a lot of resources and promotion go into games that aren't making the mark design-wise.

Like with the way other game designs or art directions fail - it is sometimes a matter of things appear decent up-close - at the level of single mechanic or animation, audio log or NPC, but taken as a whole there is little harmony.