Massive anomalies really are huge – flying centipedes and whales or great skeletal knights, all made of gunk and covered in bony plating, thundering above and between the buildings you recently cleaned.
Then, once you locate and destroy the four or five anomalies in an area, a ‘massive anomaly’ arrives, and with it those Shadow of the Colossus comparisons. “It’s wonderfully tight and focused in design, refusing the clutter of upgrades and Metroid-like ability growth, yet with that it relies heavily on varied level design to coax new applications out of your fixed tool set.” Slower, but sometimes essential to reach the next target. Another added wrinkle is that the goo itself is sticky, so you can’t skate across it, but when it’s applied to vertical surfaces you can climb it instead. With that, each anomaly becomes a kind of bite-size platforming challenge against the clock, demanding a slick chain of dashes, jumps and grapples. The catch is that as soon as you hit a weak point, there’s a tight time limit to reach the next one before the anomaly regenerates and resets.
#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER CHAIN DASH ROOM SERIES#
To remove them you have to strike or grapple a series of weak points in the gloop, to expose the eye itself. The anomalies manifest as expanses of black gunk, spread like oil slicks over walls and rooftops, each with a single eye at their centre. And she can only do that once she’s cleared a number of ‘anomalies’ in each sector that block Cyd’s functions.
To activate the void destroying ‘Starseed’ device, Rei has to reboot Cyd, an AI system. Sprinting and launching yourself around these spaces also trains you for the game’s main tasks. It’s all so frictionless that no destination ever feels too distant or like too much effort. Crucially, combining these acrobatic feats without breaking stride comes naturally, bringing an addictive quality to simply spotting and following lines through the open areas. So many neat, flat surfaces, so many tracks to grind, so many drifting chunks to leap and grapple between. It’s a relatively slim skill set, but perfect for traversing a place that’s at once shattered and cleanly preserved. And, should you need to zoom in on a grapple point or steady your aim, you can also briefly slow time.
#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER CHAIN DASH ROOM PLUS#
Add to that a swishing melee attack plus a grapple ability that pulls you into marked hooks and enemies. Her primary means of travel is to ‘skate’, rollerblading with magical smoothness across cloud or earth, boosting to make double long jumps to far flung platforms, or grinding rails that jut into the sky. Spot a point of interest in the distance, or a string of pink collectibles that must lead somewhere, then dive off towards them. Chiselled cliffs provide viewpoints from which to examine their every contortion. To Rei, they’re sites of fearsome wonder, but also playgrounds. Each is testament to an expired civilisation, like a museum of planets represented by hastily gathered artefacts. Solar Ash’s six areas are beautiful spiralling constructions, painted in blocks of sharp green, blue and pink. Notice: To display this embed please allow the use of Functional Cookies in Cookie Preferences. Tower blocks, twisted monorails and waterfalls stand layered and fragmented among the spongey formations. Within you find chunks of worlds lost to the void in the past, even a few survivors, linked by clusters of solid blue clouds. You play as Rei, a ‘voidrunner’ tasked with entering a black hole called the ‘Ultravoid’ and destroying it from inside before it absorbs her home planet. But it shares the same core attraction – a quietly alien landscape dripping with mystery, begging to be explored. On the surface, it looks a very different beast from that sombre, almost Soulslike pixel art odyssey. More than anything, however, in its soul, Solar Ash feels like developer Heart Machine’s first title, Hyper Light Drifter.
If you can put those together, you should have a rough idea. There’s definitely a slice of Shadow of the Colossus, for example, but also Jet Set Radio and perhaps a pinch of Mario Galaxy. In terms of potential gaming influences, a few spring to mind, but it’s quite a disparate bunch. There’s no simple way to describe Solar Ash.
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