In a moment, we see a broader map formed of bespoke named locations, each an expansive world full of secrets to explore. In the preview, we saw those upgrades used to rebuild Rei's health bar, bought with a goop-like currency that floats towards the player like drops of suspended blood. She inquires her way through conversations (with traditional dialogue trees), forms poems, and can call on CYD-an upgrade-dealing companion who's described as "if your kind aunt was a holographic robot network". She speaks to people in a world where everyone is, in Preston's words, trying to "escape their own pain". Rei has agency in a way the Drifter never did. Solar Ash looks to still have that, but it also has more explicit storytelling in the form of a fully voiced cast. It's during these travels that Solar Ash feels most like Hyper Light Drifter, a game that dismissed writing entirely to focus on being a mood piece-every arena doubling as a vignette of some great tragedy, small loss or welcome intimacy. There's a liquidity to the way Rei almost swims through the world that makes it feel oceanic, helped further by the coral-like structures that form this world (though Preston notes there'll be all kinds of biomes and sub-biomes beyond just mushrooms). In part, that's because much of it isn't-Rei is often seen skating across seas of clouds, rendered with the same volumetric technique used by Media Molecule's Dreams to give the game's clouds a soft fuzz that flows and reacts to your movement with delightful physicality. Hyper Light might have been a masterclass in pixel art, but its successor is something entirely its own-a surrealist world of pastel growths and towering mushrooms, where gravity is always subjective and nothing ever seems quite solid. Those quiet moments of exploration let us linger on how absolutely bloody gorgeous a thing Solar Ash is to behold.
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