The game sets up too many Proper Nouns early on-all those terms are hurled at you by way of an introductory slide-and it struggles to communicate what exactly the stakes are and why we should care.

When she arrives, her home planet is in the Ultravoid's grasp, but Rei hopes that if she can restore power to the Starseed, she can save her home planet. In each, there are plenty of audio logs and armor pieces waiting to be found if you take some time to explore.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot'sĪs you set out on this quest, you take control of Rei, a 'Voidrunner' who has traveled into the 'Ultravoid'-a massive, world-destroying black hole-in an attempt to activate the 'Starseed,' a device the Voidrunners have created in an attempt to destroy the Ultravoid. In each, you must hunt down multiple puzzles that, upon completion, let loose a massive boss. Solar Ash adopts a more traditional linear structure, unveiling six increasingly wide levels one at a time. In Hyper Light Drifter, that open-ended structure applied to the entire map, with four sections that could be tackled in any order. What the two games share is a structure that, while fairly open, is constantly funneling you toward show-stopping boss battles.

Solar Ash presents its dreamlike world and asks you to explore it by jumping, skating, and grinding along pipes. Solar Ash, meanwhile, is a 3D action-platformer in which you traverse its world on some futuristic version of inline skates, cutting up enemies with ease. Hyper Light Drifter was a blisteringly difficult Zelda-like which presented its glitching neon overworld from a top-down 2D perspective.

The second game from Heart Machine, the developer of 2016 indie gem Hyper Light Drifter, retains that game’s color palette-expect plenty of pastel blues, pinks, and purples, with the occasional threatening red-but changes just about everything else.

Solar ash switch download