Solar Ash

Solar Ash will go down as an absolute triumph of form and function, a storytelling masterclass amongst a perfectly crafted visual and audible feast. They left it to the last moment to drop right near the top of my best of 2021, but Heart Machine should be proud of their accomplishments across the board.

Solar Ash is a contemplative experience, visual feast, and faced-paced thrill ride expertly wrapped up into one exhilarating adventure. Without a doubt, this game is one of the best indie games of 2021, if not the best.

Where Solar Ash goes from an intriguing ambient platformer to one of the year’s most fascinating releases is in its fixation on living as an act of being stuck.

With a first run taking 10 hours or less, Solar Ash is a focused affair that delivers on its vision without getting distracted by extraneous missions or checklists. The scale of its massive creatures pairs well with strong level design and interesting characters. It’s hard to avoid comparisons, but bold visuals and a sense of agility help separate Solar Ash from its inspirations and provide a surreal journey that’s all its own.

Solar Ash is one of the most beautiful games of the year and plays incredibly fluid at times. Unfortunately, frustrating boss battles and erratic controls throw a spanner in the works, because this beautiful game world deserves to be explored and the platforming puzzles are fun to do.

Solar Ash makes a good first impression with its silky-smooth controls, eye-catching visuals, and bombastic boss battles, but a lack of character progression or changes to core mechanics eventually drains some of the life from the game. Solar Ash is a solid action-platformer, but it doesn’t really rise above the many other indies occupying the same space, and ultimately, you may find your memories of the game disappearing rather swiftly into the void.

This unquestionably beautiful game about saving a planet from an encroaching black hole boldly goes where few have remained awake.

Amazingly fun, exactly what I wanted out of it. If you like movement games you will love this.

Pros - Art and environmental design Soundtrack Platforming is well done and has a good challenge to it Interesting characters and lore Boss design is amazing Cons- Had some frame drops and performance issues Rei feels somewhat uneven (bad lines and tonal shifts) Some enemies feel like obstacle courses over a real threat Combat is average at best

Solar Ash feels more like a mobile game. A fun mobile game, but in terms of mechanics there is nothing particularly too deep here. It feels like it's a game for people, who aren't gamers, yet it's weirdly difficult. However the difficulty is entirely movement and timing based, so there is nothing to get better at, really. The level design is pretty nice and movement is fluid and smooth right until the game starts dropping frames like crazy. Solar Ash is optimized terribly and that really pumps the breaks in an otherwise incredibly fast paced adventure. The bigger issue is, that I got bored by the third area of this type of gameplay. Maybe for people who like to collect stuff this works, but I found the story too abstract and the collectibles uninteresting. Sadly, it outstays its welcome and it's minimal boss fights are too challenging for absolutely no reason.

Feels like it was made by amateurs on a shoe string budget. A simple concept stretched out for way too long with no progression. What you do in the first hour is what you'll be doing in the next ten. Full of glitches, camera problem, crashes, wonky platforming, and a story that has a beginning and end with nothing worth while in between. It easily could've just been an email

I wanted to love this **** I hate it. The art is amazing, but the gameplay is so shallow. Its basically non existant. You run around for a few minutes then fight the boss then repeat.. The boss fights are extremely **** the ice feel of the landscape really interferes with the lots of platform jumping required in Solar Ash