Solar Ash - Delayed

[Arcesius]

Heart Machine's second game, Solar Ash, was supposed to release on October 26. However, the studio has just announced that they have delayed the release until December 2. 

 

 

 

The game seems to combine smooth, fast traversal movement and combat against giant enemies roaming around. I just hope it can reach a quality similar to what Hyper Light Drifter, the studio's first game, has to offer. Any delay that can help the game be as good as the studio wants it to be is welcome in my book. 

 

One of the few games I'm pre-ordering as soon as possible  

 

 

 

[StraightVege]

Cool, I was unaware of this game's existence until now. Nice visual style; reminds me slightly of Bound. I'm always a bit skeptical about 3D platforming, but the gameplay looks good so far. Another one for the wishlist.

[Arcesius]

Now that Solar Ash in about to come out, a new interview with the founder of Heart Machine has been released: 

 

https://twinfinite.net/2021/11/solar-ash-interview-lead-developer/

 

There are a couple of interesting paragraphs there to read. However, the first one might be among the most interesting ones. In my opinion, Hyper Light Drifter was an incredible game gameplay-wise, but it was also aesthetically gorgeous. Solar Ash seems to put just as much emphasis on that aspect as HLD did, and this really makes me happy because he makes it sound as if he would be satisfied with the results: 

 

"

We’ve had a lot of really talented people on the team on the graphics and engineering end of things, tech-art and environment art, et cetera. You know, a lot of very talented folks working on it to get the look that we got out of it. It’s certainly challenging to have a non-PBr workflow. All of the industry is really biased towards PBR and the tools that are created and the pipelines that are there and the way that everything intercepts and what the engines are built around, so you have to do a lot of heavy lifting to go against the grain for that and get this kind of stylized more cell-shaded cartoonish or hyper colorful flat look.

 

[...]

 

Overall it’s been a blast to see what we can do with the format, with the pipeline. It’s been a big damn challenge, but we’ve had some heavy hitters on the team that have been able to knock it out of the park.

"

 

 

There are a lot of other topics that are discussed in the interview, also the difficulty and accessibility, which left me just with more questions than before reading the article: 

 

"

Well, it’s hard to compare the difficulty between the titles just because they’re such different games. Drifter really focused on the moment-to-moment combat in scenarios with some exploration and light platforming. It was a fixed view, et cetera. It had its methods and you could really pinpoint the ways that it was difficult. Whereas Solar is a lot more fluid, it’s focused on traversal, platforming elements, it’s a 3D game, and it’s third-person meaning you need to control the camera and look at a lot of things around the world. We ask a lot of you there, whereas Drifter mechanically on the gamepad was much more grounded and straightforward literally and figuratively.

This game requires a bit more on the mechanical side of things to navigate just by virtue of the camera and then you toss in the speed, you toss in the big giant boss creatures, you toss in all these other elements and it can become a big ass challenge that even the easiest version of it can be difficult. 

 

[...]

 

We don’t have very elaborate ones (accessibility options) because we’re a very small team and our game is more simple than some of those in the first place. We do what we can and we at least try to offer a lot of flexibility on difficulty changes dynamically whenever you want, we’re not locking you into a specific tier of it.

"

 

I'm not entirely sure how I should interpret this. It is still very unclear at this point what the main gameplay-loop of Solar Ash will be, other than it's supposed to be all about fluid and fast traversal first, combat second. It is also mentioned (in another interview) that the game is supposed to make the player feel tiny, and all bosses I've seen so far are enormous Shadow of the Colossus-type creatures.  

Thus, while there are definitely multiple aspects that can make this game more or less challenging, the above paragraph only talks about basic mechanics such as controlling a camera making this game less accessible than a 2D game in the first place. That, unfortunately, does not reveal much about the actual gameplay and how it's going to challenge the player. Given that this game is all about speed and movement, I definitely hope for time-attack type challenges and difficult boss battles. 

 

The second half of this quote, however, seems to indicate that they will either include multiple difficulty settings that can be changed on the fly, or that you can tune specific gameplay elements to make the game easier or harder (maybe something similar to what Axiom Verge 2 did..?). 

 

 

In any case... I am still looking very much forward to this game. 

 

"I’m sure there’ll be people out there that love Drifter and don’t like this game. I’m sure there’ll be people who love Drifter and do like this game. I think it’ll resonate with folks. I hope it does."

 

I hope so too.. and I hope to be one of the players falling into the second category!