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.
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.
2 Comments
@gruel the lack of dialogue in HLD was a big reason why I thought it was so boring. I didn't think there was even that much here, unless you go out of your way to talk to the NPCs and listen to the logs. Rei sometimes goes YEAG when she bounces on stuff or whatever but that's it
gruel
26 days ago