There are also a few NPCs you can meet who give you optional side quests that encourage you to explore the Void more thoroughly. You’ll uncover void caches left by other Voidrunners you know in each zone that tell the stories of their own journeys and can help you unlock new void suits with different passive abilities. Ultimately, the loop in each area is the same you skate, jump, climb, grapple, and grind your way across the landscape collecting motes of Plasma (the game’s somewhat arbitrary currency) and searching out the various places the local Remnant guardian has rooted itself and beat it back to weaken it. Every new locale you explore feels bigger and more mind-bending than the last, constantly increasing the sense of scope and grandeur you experience as you go, and helping underscore both the destructive power and the apparent longevity of the Ultravoid. It’s a game of high stakes and big ideas, and it sets the bar pretty high for itself. There’s also the minor issue of the giant, otherworldly entity known as Echo who can’t directly prevent Rei from achieving her goal but will throw everything in their power at her to stop her in her tracks. Only weakening the Remnants and defeating them will allow Rei to re-establish her connection with Cyd, her AI companion, and gradually power up the Starseed. The Void is teeming with strange malevolent enemies and Remnants, strange colossal creatures guarding each of its unique areas and preventing the Starseed from activating. Of course, it’s not as simple as powering up and pressing a big “save the world” button. To stop the Ultravoid once and for all, you have to power up and engage the Starseed, another mysterious piece of Voidtech that purports to be the key to salvation but the inner workings of which are poorly understood. Within the Ultravoid is a strange and exciting world full of danger and wonder, shaped by the twisted fragments of other planets it has devoured and sparsely populated by some wayward citizens who have been forever ensnared within. You are Rei, a uniquely skilled Voidrunner who uses her mysterious Voidtech gear to plunge into black holes for adventure and fortune, who must now enter the planet-eating Ultravoid that is on track to consume her home world to save it from certain destruction. Solar Ash throws this right out the window and has a field day with the limits of possibility and doesn’t concern itself much with what probably is, which is the key element of its charm and success in ensnaring the player. While the “hard” science fiction options tend to be some of the most impactful, they don’t leave a lot of room for playing around with what could be. We’ve seen countless great examples of sci-fi trying to examine what lies beyond the unknown, and some of the strangest and hardest hitting successes are the ones that frame seemingly impossible concepts against the comfort and familiarity of life and reality as we know it (I’m looking at you, 2001 and Interstellar). The game tells a story of sacrifice and loss using exploration as its primary device, and traversing the void to uncover its secrets (and hopefully save your planet) is an utterly sublime experience. From its striking first moments of staring down the business end of a beautifully rendered accretion disk and plunging straight into the Ultravoid on your interstellar skates, Solar Ash is oozing with style, grace, and all of the neon-drenched sci-fi trappings you can handle. Skating across the strata of ruined wastes of planets long ago pulled across the event horizon, leaping between outcroppings and weaving through ruined civilizations against the backdrop of impossible geology, you can’t help but wonder how you’ve never played anything like this before.
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