Solar Ash, or, Sonic the Hedgehog & the Inevitability of Death

for real the controls/movement legitimately handle like sonic adventure

whether this statement counts as praise or criticism will probably depend on the individual lol

(I'm enjoying it)

yo I finished Solar Ash

def recommend it

really fun movement and REALLY strong level design to support it. I wouldn't call it a platformer but it's in that same design space of, like, being mostly about traversing interesting 3D spaces, and it's *exceptionally* good at it

I feel like there have been a lot of really ambitious indie games in this sort of "journeyish traversal of evocative landscapes, but with a way more explicit narrative, and light combat/bosses, and open-ish world" space

imo this is the first one to really completely nail it?

not gonna name others bc I'm not trying to dunk on anyone, but I've played a lot of them and usually been disappointed lol

if your game's mainly about movement, that movement needs to feel GREAT, and then you need level design backing it up. Those are both very hard/intangible

Solar Ash nails the small-scale moment-to-moment stuff, like "I can see a thing up there, how do I get to it", and then ALSO nails the multi-hour scale of like, progressing from one place to another and keeping momentum and sense of discovery

pacing is HARD to do this well lol

also the environment art kicks ass, which further helps the exploration stuff

my only real complaint is I could probably go the entire rest of my life without listening to another audio log next to another corpse, but, ehh, Videogames lol

also it's like 8 hours long, which is both MASSIVE given the size of the team, and also exactly as long as it needs to be. Pacing stays tight throughout, nothing overstays its welcome, the sense of scale is huge but no space is wasted. Whole game's ridiculously well scoped