2/5 ★ – pixelsaturn's review of Solar Ash.

Date abandoned: 04/03/2022 Platform: Playstation 5 Time played: 4.5 hours I started off really enjoying Solar Ash. The movement, world, colour pallet, boss designs and gameplay loop were all great. I pretty much stand by all of that. What lets this down hugely for me and the reason I’m putting this down about half way through is its narrative and how that narrative is presented to you. The narrative is super jargon heavy, with very little meaningful character motivation or complexity to back it all up, aside from the main goal being to save your planet from a black hole (or something.) I could not shake the feeling that this world would be so much more enthralling and awe-inspiring if you weren’t constantly talking to NPCs and finding journal entries and logs that are constantly trying to explain this incredibly weird world with exposition dumps. They try to make it feel more personal by having it all told from the perspective of other characters that you’ll never meet but for me it didn’t help. This kinda thing works in a lot of videogames… I don’t think it works here. It actively hurts this games atmosphere and feel and it kinda ruined the whole experience for me. Not to mention that each little sub-world got increasingly more overwhelming and complicated to explore and figure out and by that point I’d had enough and didn’t feel the need to push forward anymore. A shame, I was really looking forward to this one ever since I first saw the reveal trailer, but yeah… this would be a solid 8 if you completely stripped out every line of dialogue and replaced it with visual storytelling and world building and VERY minimal dialogue… which is exactly what this game’s biggest inspiration, Shadow of the Colossus, does!