Solar Ash Review: Running Through Walls of Flame Still Holds Up Five Years On

Solar Ash asks you to save a planet by killing the giant things living inside the black hole that is eating it. Heart Machine’s follow-up to Hyper Light Drifter launched on December 2, 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC, and it has since spread to nearly every platform still standing. It is a traversal game first and a combat game second, and the published critic aggregate sits at 8.2/10 across seven outlets. That number is about right. Solar Ash is not the tightest game Heart Machine has made, but it is the one that moves best.

Trailer, via IGN.

Rei Skates Into the Ultravoid

You play Rei, a Voidrunner voiced by Fryda Wolff, racing to save her home planet as it gets pulled toward the Ultravoid, an immense, all-consuming black hole. She enters the thing rather than fleeing it. Inside is a neon-hued cosmic realm of drifting landscapes, and she crosses it on foot, skating and soaring over obstacles and into enemies.

The game gives her energy slashes and a phase-shifted hard light sword. Combat exists. It is just not the point.

Lead developer Alx Preston said the game puts movement ahead of fighting. He described the vision as controlling how Rei travels and the spaces she travels through, plus the sheer spectacle of it — the sense of scale that makes her feel impossibly small. Traversal takes precedence, he said, and combat is mixed into it rather than set apart from it.

That is the whole design document. Solar Ash wants you small. It wants the Remnants — colossal creatures you scale and slay to hold back your world’s doom — to dwarf you completely.

The Remnants Are the Reason to Play

The Remnants are where Solar Ash earns its keep. Each one is a puzzle and a chase at the same time. You climb onto a titanic beast, find the weak points, and move. Standing still is failure. The game’s best moments are the ones where you are running along a living thing’s back while it tries to throw you into the void.

The scale works because the movement works. Rei is fast, and the game trusts you to handle her. There is a real difference between a game that lets you go fast and a game built around going fast, and Solar Ash is the second kind. The environments are dreamlike and drifting, and the game keeps finding new ways to make you feel like you are falling forward rather than running.

The combat is thinner. Energy slashes and the hard light sword get the job done, but they never carry a fight the way the traversal carries a sequence. When Solar Ash asks you to stand and trade hits, it loses something. When it asks you to move, it is one of the better games of its year.

A Story About Trauma, Told in Neon

The science fiction story explores themes of trauma and moving on from dramatic, devastating life events. Rei is not just saving a planet. She is a person running from something, and the Ultravoid is where that catches up with her.

The game is set in the same fictional universe as Hyper Light Drifter, Heart Machine’s first game, but there are no direct connections between the two stories. That is the right call. The shared universe gives Solar Ash a family resemblance without forcing it to carry continuity it does not need.

The neon palette does a lot of work here. A story about devastation could easily go gray and grim. Solar Ash goes bright instead, and the contrast makes the sadness land harder. The Void beckons, and it looks beautiful.

Platforms and How to Play It

Solar Ash arrived first on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC. The rest of the rollout took longer.

The game is a single-player, third-person action-adventure platformer. It is published by Annapurna Interactive and developed by Heart Machine. Its genres are platform, adventure and indie, with action and science fiction themes.

• Rei, voiced by Fryda Wolff, the Voidrunner you control
• The Ultravoid, the black hole swallowing her home planet
• Remnants, the colossal creatures Rei scales and slays
• Energy slashes and a phase-shifted hard light sword, her weapons
• The Voidrunner home planet, the thing all of this is for

Where Solar Ash Falls Short

The combat is the weak link, and it is not close. Solar Ash builds an entire language of movement and then hands you a sword that does not speak it. The fights that should be climaxes often read as interruptions. You want to be skating. The game makes you stop.

There is also a question of focus. The game is bright and strange and full of spectacle, and it occasionally mistakes more for better. The Ultravoid is enormous, and some stretches of it are enormous without being interesting. Traversal-first is the correct vision. It does not mean every stretch of traversal earns its place.

None of this sinks the game. It just keeps Solar Ash from being the thing it is clearly reaching for.

The Verdict on Solar Ash

Solar Ash is a game about momentum, and it mostly holds its own. The Remnants are the best idea in it — colossal, strange, and genuinely fun to climb — and the movement system underneath them is good enough to carry a whole game. The story about trauma and moving on gives the neon something to mean.

The 8.2/10 aggregate is fair. It reflects a game that is excellent at its central idea and merely competent everywhere else. If Heart Machine had found a way to make combat feel like traversal, this would be a higher score. It did not, and that is the gap.

What matters most here is that Solar Ash knows what it is. Preston said the vision was traversal, environments and spectacle, and the game delivers on all three. The combat is mixed into that traversal, as he put it, but it never becomes it. That is the honest description of the game, and it is also the fairest criticism of it.

Play Solar Ash for the Remnants. Play it for the speed. Do not play it for the sword fights, because the sword fights are the part where the game forgets what it is good at. Everything else is worth the trip into the Ultravoid.

Annapurna Interactive · Heart Machine · Hyper Light Drifter · Indie Games · Platformer · Solar Ash