EDIT: SPOILERS NOW OPEN

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club Year 3! Our 7th game of 2024 is Solar Ash. The target completion date is April 8, 2024.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after April 8, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Solar Ash?

Solar Ash is a 3D traversal game with some similarities to The Pathless set in the same universe as Hyper Light Drifter. Very stylish and pretty with unique mechanics.

How long is Solar Ash?

How long to beat lists it as 5.5 hours long.

Having now started this game I want to say a few things to encourage others to jump in

1) It is much more accessible than I expected. I bounced off Hyper Light Drifter because it didn't really make sense to me and I wasn't drawn to its world. This game has dialog that explains the story (which is a mixed blessing) but also is just much more intuitive to play for me, personally. Which may be because:

2) This game feels a LOT like the Pathless. To the point where if it weren't for their release dates I would have thought that Solar Ash was directly inspired by the PS5 launch game. As it is I would be very surprised if the developers didn't at least play The Pathless when it came out and incorporate some of its ideas into the movement, and the games are structured very similarly. I'm on record as liking The Pathless quite a bit, and especially how it feels, so this is a good thing IMO. They're also both Annapurna games so the teams may have had contact pre-release. There are some big differences. Solar Ash has combat outside the boss encounters, it is melee rather than range focused, and most importantly it does not have flight or gliding but rather grappling and grinding, at least where I am in the game. The games also have different aesthetics (and I like Solar Ash's more, though The Pathless looked great too) but they share a lot in terms of feel.

3) The game is very chill and explorative. I got the impression somehow that it was super intense and demanding but it's not. It's a great game to relax with and just explore a very neat alien environment.

This one took me by surprise because I didn't know if I would like it but I really do so far. It's not perfect, of course, and I'm sure I'll nit pick it once discussion opens up (one thing I will say is that if you do some of the optional dialog stuff it is way too talky and maybe too explanatory and accessible for the atmosphere it is going for) but it's very easy to dive into and the movement feels good, which is 75% of the battle in these kinds of games.

Highly recommended to at least try out and see if you like it. That's what Game Pass and the club are all about. Low barrier to entry!

Spoilers are now open. I don't want to dominate the conversation so I'll let some others weigh in but I will say that I think the game gets less fun as it goes along. It probably peaked in the mushroom world for me, because I really liked those puzzle mechanics and figuring out how it all worked, but after that the main issue was that it just got tedious. Specifically I felt like the last couple worlds were way too big and needed some kind of fast travel option. It's not impossible to navigate to the places you HAVE to go, but if you're trying to do side quests or whatever it just starts to feel very annoying. And that toxic ooze mechanic is just unpleasant.

I still like the game overall, but I can see why it has such a low completion percentage despite not being particularly difficult. It's annoying and sometimes frustrating. And the camera gets in the way far too often, especially during boss fights when it highlights those grapple points that you can't actually grapple to because you're blocked by something you can't quite see.

Gorgeous visuals, mostly good feeling movement, some decent worldbuilding and atmosphere, fine voice acting, there's a lot to say that's positive about it, but some more polish to the camera and combat and some slightly smaller maps for the last couple of worlds would have really taken it to another level.

Don't have a lot to add: agree with your points — though overall I think I enjoyed this more than you did. But yes, it does indeed feel like it is certain tweaks and additions away from being something special.

I tend to prefer wordless storytelling, and dug the etheral and mysterious feel of Hyper Light Drifter. (A lot of credit to the intensely atmospheric Disasterpeace soundtrack for empowering the mood, of course) In that regard I don't know if Solar Ash is a improvement, exactly.

Pretty curious about Hyper Light Breaker, which, you could say, combine the learnings from Hearthmachine's previous games.

@manburger: Reading back over what I wrote it comes off more negative than I really felt, just because I was disappointed with how the game developed. I was surprised at how much I liked the beginning of the game and the exploration aspect and then I was disappointed in how it progressed. It stayed fun in a lot of ways but it just seems like it lost some of that tightness and focus.

I agree with you that the storytelling was not a highlight. I'm fine with wordless narratives and I'm fine with verbal narratives but I feel like Solar Ash kind of splits the difference in that it uses words but it doesn't really say that much. I mean there definitely is "a story" and there are themes and characters and even, kind of, a character arc, but mostly it just hints at these broader worlds and ideas without delving into them. It's kind of like wordless storytelling in that it creates a lot of questions and room for imagination, but it also takes away some of that magic by spelling out just a little too much while also not spinning these dense, complex, worlds you can sink your teeth into. It is far from the worst story in a game, and in terms of the actual writing it is probably well above average, but in some ways it feels caught between the two concepts of hinting at a world and fully fleshing it out.

I think the Pathless did a little bit of the same thing but a bit better, mostly because its world was easier to grasp than Solar Ash's extremely ambitious sci-fi storytelling, which may be part of the issue. It is presenting a lot of very complicated ideas and interweaving narratives and trying to do so through a handful of audio logs and some conversations with NPCs who are living in different realities.