In Solar Ash, you travel across a range of different platforming landscapes, and in each one you must destroy a series of targets in order to summon the landscape's resident beast. Fights that feel like a part of traversal rather than an interruption.īeaks and bones! But despite the wild setting, there is order here too. Brisk fights, each one, dealt with in a few sharp seconds as you pass by, ideally, without stopping. You fight alien blob creatures with glowing eyes and beaks and mantles of bone. Schwarzschild! Mobius! We are in their world now, suspended.

There is a lost world that might yet be saved, and so you skate and skate while space and time do strange black-hole things. The whole thing is set inside a black hole, according to the fragmentary narrative, an old mosaic of a story that will reconstruct itself tile by tile if you have the energy to hunt for the pieces. Dunked in a cloud: not a bad start to the day. The sky is very clear and the ground is often cloud, soft duvet mounds of pearly blue that will hold you up but which, brilliantly, still see you disappearing into the blurred depths for a few early seconds before momentum carries you back to the surface. Connection is forgiving - even grind rails have a sort of mag-lev dreaminess to them, so you can hop on and off without much in the way of fiddliness. The earth curves away in strange, promising pathways. You ghost frictionlessly over the landscape here, a thing of will and direction only. It's a cosmic skating game with spectacular rinks and it absolutely does not want you to stop moving even for a second. This is Solar Ash, and Solar Ash is a skating game, really. Availability: Out December 2nd on PC (Epic Games Store), and PlayStation 4 and 5.It was beautiful and teasing and I wondered how to get there. The island was facing downwards, so where there should be stars, I saw patchy grass and the tops of noble pines.

Late last night I stood in a floating church, looking up through the bones of the shattered ceiling towards the sky, where an island hung above me. This glorious game about movement and adventure also feels like a rumination on something deeper and more personal.

Download solar ash gamepass