Ambrosia Sky

A dead colony, and a very unusual way to explore it

Ambrosia Sky is developed by Toronto studio Soft Rains in partnership with Blackbird Interactive, the Vancouver studio behind Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and released its first instalment, Act One, on 10 November 2025. Players take the role of Dalia, a field scientist belonging to an order pursuing human immortality, who returns to a farming colony in Saturn's outer rings to find it abandoned and overtaken by a strange, aggressive fungus. The game's core hook pairs two genres that don't often share a sentence: a first-person powerwashing mechanic, directly evoking the satisfying, low-stakes loop of Powerwash Simulator, wrapped around a slower, more contemplative exploration of what happened to the colony's residents, told through terminal logs, recorded monologues and environmental storytelling in a mode reviewers repeatedly compare to System Shock, Prey and Tacoma. The story was originally planned as a three-act series; Soft Rains later consolidated it into two acts, with Act One representing the version of the game most reviewers wrote about at launch.

Where the atmosphere lands

The praise that recurs most consistently across Ambrosia Sky's review corpus is about craft rather than systems. Reviewers describe the game's art direction as genuinely striking, with more than one noting that the team's evidently limited resources were spent precisely where they mattered most, rather than stretched thin trying to match a bigger studio's technical fidelity. One detailed review describes the overall experience as something like "Mario Sunshine, Dead Space and System Shock passing the blunt," played sincerely rather than for horror even though the setting is, in that reviewer's words, existentially horrific. Zero-gravity sections draw specific, repeated praise as some of the game's strongest moments, with movement described as noticeably improving once the player leaves standard gravity behind. Music and the game's recorded-monologue story sequences — reflections on colonists who died before Dalia's arrival — draw the most emotionally weighted praise in the corpus, with at least one reviewer specifically calling those scenes worth the price of the game on their own, even while criticising other elements.

The systems underneath the atmosphere

Set against that praise, a substantial and detailed minority argues Ambrosia Sky's actual systems don't match either its immersive-sim marketing or the emotional ambition of its writing. One reviewer who completed the entire game breaks the mission structure down specifically: nine missions total, split largely between "collect the thing and escape in a time limit" and "collect several things and leave" templates, with mechanics that in some cases actually stop functioning correctly in later missions rather than building on themselves. Puzzles draw a related, more specific complaint — one reviewer describes an eight-wire rotation puzzle where every single wire required exactly one turn to solve, undercutting any real sense of challenge. The cleaning mechanic itself, while broadly praised as satisfying in isolation, draws its own more technical criticism: several reviewers note the default spray and nozzle handle roughly 90 percent of the game's fungus without needing any of the unlockable upgrades, undermining the sense that different fungus types demand genuinely different tools or approaches.

A more structural complaint concerns the decision to release the story across separate acts rather than as one complete package. Several reviewers who bought Act One at launch report frustration that the narrative stops mid-story by design, and at least one detailed critical review specifically flags that Soft Rains hadn't yet clarified at release whether the remaining chapters would arrive as free updates or paid expansions, a decision the reviewer felt should have been settled before asking players to buy into an intentionally incomplete story. A related pacing complaint describes the writing leaning on "tell, don't show" emotional beats — asking players to feel grief for specific colonists introduced only briefly through unlocked terminal logs — as a structural mismatch between the story's ambitions and the amount of groundwork actually laid before its most dramatic moments.

A genuinely distinctive pitch, unevenly executed

Reading the full spread of reviews together, Ambrosia Sky reads less like a broken or mediocre game and more like a genuinely interesting pitch whose systems haven't yet caught up to its atmosphere and writing. Several reviewers explicitly frame their criticism this way, recommending the game anyway specifically because its best moments — the zero-gravity traversal, the recorded reflections on the colony's dead, the overall art direction — are strong enough to be worth experiencing even with thinner mechanical scaffolding underneath them. That's a genuinely different failure mode than most disappointing immersive sims, where the systems work but nothing around them justifies engaging with them; here, the reverse is closer to true, with several reviewers specifically wishing the gameplay did more to earn the strength of the world Soft Rains built around it.

Value

At NZ$38.49 for Act One, Ambrosia Sky asks a fair amount for what several reviewers describe as a five-to-ten-hour experience that intentionally leaves its story unresolved, a structural choice that's worth understanding clearly before buying rather than discovering partway through. The Very Positive score — 248 positive against 29 negative across 277 reviews — reflects a review base that largely forgives the shallower systems in favour of the atmosphere, writing and the specific emotional high points the story does land. For players drawn to narrative-first exploration games who can accept comparatively simple puzzle and mission design in exchange for a genuinely distinctive setting and strong presentation, that trade is a reasonable one; for players buying specifically on the strength of the immersive-sim comparisons in its marketing, the review corpus is honest that the systems here are considerably shallower than genre touchstones like Prey or System Shock.