Solar Ash
The first thought that crosses our mind as the credits roll on Heart Machine’s ambitious actionplatformer: we can’t wait for the speedruns. That’s no surprise for a game that has, as the developer put it to us, “two buttons for go”. At its best, it feels like Jet Set Radio meets Shadow Of The Colossus for the AGDQ generation. It’s a game about moving fast and looking good while doing so – without letting the small matter of the end of the world get in the way. And in practised hands, for the most part, it manages to achieve both.
From its edges and surfaces to its colour palette, it’s a softer, looser game than Hyper Light Drifter, less precise and only occasionally as demanding. Rei is a drifter in a very different sense, moving with an easy grace that belies the urgency of her mission. Her world may be on the verge of disappearing into the Ultravoid –a black hole gobbling up planets, with Rei’s next on the menu – but she’s clearly enjoying navigating the fragments left behind. Sometimes, in full flow, she lets out a yelp of delight as if marvelling at her own agility. The thrill this evokes is somewhere between a sustained period of web-slinging in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games – albeit with fewer of those windmilling plunges – and a clean run of tricks and grinds in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.