Heart Machine’s elegant actionplatformer redefines open-world traversal

By Chris Schilling

The Old City Wyrm is one of the biggest videogame bosses we’ve seen in quite some time. This behemoth is a Remnant, in the parlance of Solar Ash, but its name hardly does it justice. Imagine a cross between the serpentine Leviathans from the MCU and the 13th colossus, and you wouldn’t be too far away – but if anything, its size is more imposing than either. By comparison, player-character Rei is the equivalent of a gnat, scuttling up its fins as they trail through a sea of pillowy clouds. She heads towards a series of strange protrusions spread across the Wyrm’s body (which don’t look like weak spots so much as release valves) and strikes them one by one, scampering across its spine and down its tail, following a pulsating energy trail – nerve impulses, perhaps? – as she leaps from one bony plate to the next. Darting back up to its head, she hits the final pustulous growth, and the Wyrm bucks and writhes, parts of its exoskeleton dissolving to reveal a fresh set of boils to lance. Rei lands on a nearby patch of ground with feline agility and pushes off once more. Time for round two.

YOU HURTLE PAST PINK-LEAVED TREES AND ZIP ACROSS PLATFORMS SET AGAINST EXPANSIVE PEACHES-AND-CREAM SKIES

Game director Chelsea Hash on the game’s SDF rendering: “We could make much larger worlds that fit with the super-smooth rendering style of the rest of the game”

Game SolarAsh

Developer Heart Machine

Publisher Annapurna Interactive

Format PC, PS4, PS5

Release 2021

The second part is a little trickier now the beast is aware it’s under attack. It banks and spins, raising one of those fins skyward as Rei takes hold and slides down onto its back, ready to repeat the trick. The classic videogame rule of three dictates that there’s more to come, but even so, it’s all over within minutes, as Rei drives one final needle into its head. This prompts a dazzling visual flourish as the camera zooms in, all colour instantly draining away as she pulls it out, unleashing a flash of pink and a vivid rush of manga-like motion lines as a burst of pure energy is released.

Spectacular though it is, it’s not the boss or even the way you finish it off that stands out most. Rather, it’s Rei herself. A shadowy, masked figure sporting an all-in-one body suit, a translucent pink-purple cape and ‘hair’ like a smoking ember, she looks slightly gawky and awkward when standing still. But in motion? That’s another story. If the Shadow Of The Colossus influence is obvious, the fight doesn’t feel like a desperate struggle at all; we begin to think how much better Wander might have fared had he been equipped with rollerblades and an air-dash. Perhaps Ueda missed a trick.

After such a critically acclaimed and deeply personal debut in Hyper Light Drifter (its hero’s journey was a metaphor for creative director and studio founder Alx Preston’s own struggles with congenital heart disease), Heart Machine’s next game could so easily have succumbed to second album syndrome. Yet Preston had a firm idea of what he wanted the studio’s followup to be from a very early stage. “A year before we even started prototyping, I was drafting a pitch and creating a world and doing all these different things,” he says. He knew it had to be 3D, having found himself “tapped out on pixel art, and beyond that just 2D in general. I wanted to build something that I could truly let players escape into.”