Solar Ash

Solar Ash puts you on a pair of grind-rail boots, skating across the fractured remains of a collapsing star system in search of your lost home, scaling colossal alien creatures called Remnants and piecing together a sparse, philosophical story about grief and loss along the way. It's the second game from Heart Machine, the small studio behind the widely beloved Hyper Light Drifter, published by Annapurna Interactive. The game's original release was 2 December 2021, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC via a timed Epic Games Store exclusive; Steam didn't get it until a year later, in December 2022, which is why its Steam review count — 1,494 total — is smaller than a game of this pedigree would usually carry. What it sits at is Very Positive, roughly 90% positive, a solid number that hides a specific, remarkably consistent verdict running through years of reviews.

What Solar Ash gets right

The traversal is the game's clearest, most consistently praised strength. Reviewers across the sample — positive and negative alike — single out the momentum-based skating as genuinely satisfying, drawing comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus's scale and Sonic's speed in the same breath. "Shadow of Colossus on rollerblades," reads one 2026 review, capturing a comparison that recurs independently across the sample. The art direction draws similarly close to universal praise — striking, painterly sci-fi environments that several reviewers say are worth experiencing on their own, even from reviewers who go on to describe the game overall as a disappointment. The boss-scale Remnant encounters, where the skating traversal and combat intersect at their biggest scale, are consistently called out as the game's best individual moments, distinct from the more repetitive open-world traversal between them.

A game that plateaus early

Set against that praise, one specific, consistent complaint runs through the negative sample from the game's Steam launch through 2026: Solar Ash largely establishes its mechanical and narrative ideas in its first zone and doesn't meaningfully build on them for the rest of the game. "The first zone you beat is pretty much how the rest of the game is going to be, nearly one to one for the rest of the other" areas, reads one representative 2025 review. Another: "It's cool. I like it. But I can't recommend it. I enjoyed it for a while but left dissatisfied with what I got. The ending in particular falls flat." A third, more pointed: "Everything in the game feels low stakes / impactless ... it's sort of surprising they left non-boss combat in it at all, since it doesn't feel elegant." The story draws a parallel version of the same complaint — reviewers consistently describe it as sparse and philosophically ambitious without fully paying off that ambition, with the ending specifically singled out across multiple reviews as the weakest part of the experience.

A specific, more concrete technical complaint recurs alongside these design criticisms: poor Steam Deck performance. "This game still runs verrrry poorly on the Steam Deck," reads a 2023 review, and the complaint doesn't disappear from later reviews in the sample, suggesting it was never fully resolved for handheld players specifically, distinct from the broader design critique.

The shadow of Hyper Light Drifter

What sharpens every one of these complaints, more than they'd land on their own, is the specific pedigree Solar Ash carries. A meaningful share of the review sample is explicitly written by self-identified Hyper Light Drifter fans, and the comparison consistently works against the newer game. "I expected great things from Heart Machine. Hyper Light Drifter was cool, highly stylized, and different... Solar Ash is not that," reads one review. Another, more pointed, from a player with 150-plus hours in the earlier game: "This is a really disappointing platformer and I did 100% completion of it... I really wanted to love it because I love Hyper Light Drifter." This isn't a complaint about Solar Ash failing on its own terms so much as a recurring sense across the sample that a studio capable of something tighter and more distinctive delivered something merely solid instead — a different kind of disappointment than a simply bad game generates, and one that shows up specifically because of who made it.

It's worth balancing this against the sample's genuine fans, who are real and vocal in their own right: "great game tbh. had a blast playing it... idk why people are complaining about" it, reads one 2026 review, and several others describe the game as exactly the chill, movement-focused experience they wanted without measuring it against the developer's earlier work at all. Reviewers who approach Solar Ash as its own thing, rather than a Hyper Light Drifter successor, consistently report a better experience than those who don't.

How it has aged

The achievement data is consistent with a shortish, well-paced game most buyers finish without pushing into full completion: a top achievement around 93%, tapering to a median of 33% across 32 achievements, with the hardest challenges — a full endgame speedrun and hard-mode completion — sitting around 4-5%, a fairly typical curve for a 7-13 hour game with light optional extras. Reviews have continued arriving steadily through 2026, several years after the Steam release, suggesting Solar Ash has settled into a stable, moderately-sized audience rather than fading from view — neither a forgotten disappointment nor a sleeper hit that grew beyond its initial reception.

7 out of 10. Solar Ash remains a genuinely well-crafted, beautiful movement-based platformer that earns real, specific praise for its traversal and art — undercut by a consistent sense, across years of reviews and especially among fans of Heart Machine's earlier work, that it establishes its best ideas early and doesn't build meaningfully on them, closing on a story that several reviewers specifically call unsatisfying. Play it for the skating and the scale of its Remnant fights rather than expecting Hyper Light Drifter's tighter, stranger successor, and you'll likely land closer to the sample's satisfied reviewers than its disappointed ones.