You, a character called Rei, can talk to various other characters you find dotted around, selecting dialogue options as you do so. There are also voices now where there weren’t any before. It’s not quite as detailed as the game before, but there’s a lovely mixture of strong, almost bruised colours that help build the surreal feeling of the warped and bizarre worlds around you, and the new perspective certainly helps amplify the feeling of size in the world and the enormousness of the creatures you face. Now, you can more or less seamlessly flow around, and there’s an obvious pleasure in doing so. Now, the edges of areas no longer halt you as you load the next. Alx Preston would like it to play like a Mario game too, which is a heady goal, though having only seen someone else play it, I can’t tell if he’s managed.Įnabling all of this, this idea of movement and freedom, is the move from Hyper Light Drifter’s intricate, pixelated 2D world, to a broader, more open 3D one. It’s even got that kind of cartoon sheen, that softness. And when the bosses get so big they engulf entire mini-planets, like the plated, lizardy boss I see – which is apparently the smallest of them all – Solar Ash begins to look a lot like Only then can you find their weak spots and bring them down, like in Shadow of the Colossus. They’re so big that defeating them involves climbing them and treating them like moving levels of their own. A few quick acrobatic hits see off most enemies and you’re on your way again, and it creates a flowing kind of feeling to the game.Ī recent gameplay walkthrough of Solar Ash.īosses follow the same logic. There is some but it’s there to make you think about the route you’ve picked, or to try and interrupt you. It’s not, like Hyper Light Drifter, a game about combat. When you’re doing Solar Ash properly, you’re moving at speed. You fling grappling hooks to bridge chasms and you swing to new areas, and you scramble up sticky, sludgy growths to reach others. You skate on multicoloured clouds which bobble up behind you, and then you grind along glowing rails sprouting from alien pods. Solar Ash is a game about movement, a game about speeding around bizarre fantasy landscapes and confronting enormous bosses who live there.
Hyper light drifter walkthrough north Pc#
Availability: Releases 26th October on PC (Epic Games Store), and PlayStation 4 and 5.