![]() ![]() To that end, main character Rei is all about speed – gaining momentum, understanding your jumping angles and making the most of your traversal skillset is key to understanding how to navigate Solar Ash’s imposing universe. He notes that every jump, every ability, every iota of movement, is perfectly telegraphed and presented to the player with such expression, it’ll basically never age. ![]() “ Super Mario 64 had this depth and expressivity of character control,” he says, “that we really want to communicate in Solar Ash.” Preston went on to explain how, even today, you can pick up a Nintendo 64 pad and immediately know the limits of what Mario can do in Nintendo’s remarkable platformer. Oddly enough for a game that looks like Soul Reaver via Sunset Overdrive – and drips with this apocalyptic, cosmic-horror tone – Preston keeps coming back to Super Mario 64. All the while Preston, energetic and clearly proud of his latest creation, narrated the experience and gave some insight into why the cyan, magenta and gold landscapes of Solar Ash exist in the first place. In a hands-off gameplay demo, a well-versed QA staffer from Heart Machine nimbly jumped and deftly slid through a couple of the game’s barren and broken regions, showing off how important movement is to the core concept of the game. In Solar Ash, you take on the role of a Voidrunner named Rei – a protagonist that could have been plucked right out of the ’90s with that scarf, those spindly proportions, and those slick movements – who is tasked with traversing through myriad vaporwave biomes in a desperate bid to save her homeworld from the Ultravoid ( Solar Ash speak for a massive black hole that swallows entire worlds, Galactus-style). ![]() READ MORE: Can video games depict serious illness? Yes, and they should.At one point, Preston says that the game is some lonely amalgam of Shadow of the Colossus, Super Mario Odyssey, and Jet Set Radio – it’s all action platforming, stylish traversal, and skirting the shadows of looming, monolithic entities. “S olar Ash is about speed and movement and flow, and so that’s what our challenges should be about, too,” says Heart Machine’s founder and creative director Alx Preston. ![]()
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