In Solar Ash, the follow-up to developer Heart Machine's debut Hyper Light Drifter, style and substance seem at odds. The former is abundant, but where the latter should be, it is blank. Visual novelty and cleverness keep the game gliding along, but no amount of wacky sets, stylish transitions, or beautiful landscapes thrown in can fill the void.

Players play as Ray, a void runner. Ray throws herself into a black hole in order to activate a "starseed," a MacAfee that is said to be able to save her planet, which is currently trapped in a singularity. Inside this black hole is a dreamlike landscape of soft clouds and goopy surfaces in bold colors. Ultravoid. Rei lands on a hill like candy floss, jumping and pulling the sticky mass behind her. Even the collectible plasma is represented as a liquid mass. The world seems ephemeral, destined to wash away. The world is like a giant planetoid floating in space, attached to each other through clouds and thin rails.

If the world feels "wet," so too does the movement, as you skate along, slipping and sliding with the force of inertia. If you chain skate as you grind the rails, you will eventually gain a great deal of momentum. The game comes alive as you speed up to go over the crest of a hill, turn a corner, or charge into an enemy. In those moments, Solar Ash is a roller coaster of energy, confidently hurtling through alien landscapes. If you've ever skated in real life, especially on ice, you'll know how well it captures that unique exhilaration.

New areas gradually become larger and more open, giving you more room to play as your skills improve. Personal favorites include an area with floating shipwrecks and an eerie fungal biome where you can summon rails with spores. Not all areas are as well-developed as this one, but the novelty of the area put a smile on my face.

Moving around the world is great, but the tasks you are tasked with are much more tedious. Each area has the exact same structure: find and destroy a few obstacles in each area to summon a boss, then attack the boss's weak spot and hit it in the eye. After repeating that three times, move on to the next area and repeat the process.

Disasterpeace is responsible for the soundtrack, but there seems to be far less room to move than for players who chain together boss fights and extensive ambient soundscapes. Virtually none of the strange little scenes that filled "Hyper Light Drifter" and allowed the music to fill the gaps in the story with moody anguish and sadness are present; in "Solar Ash," the music is a pleasant accompaniment and undoubtedly creates a strong atmosphere, but the visuals and Like the visuals, it is deprived of the opportunity to evoke something of weight.

Coming from "Hyper Light Drifter," I was expecting a similarly compelling setting. Instead, Solar Ash's story is full of dead-ends that sometimes make it difficult to navigate its world. The biggest problem with the game lies in the additional voice acting. There is a message at the beginning to convey the premise, but it seems clumsy. However, from the moment it begins, the characters never stop talking or explaining. Each time they find a new view or item, Rei explains it before asking a question. As soon as a city comes into view, Rei already identifies the architecture and talks about its creators.

It takes away from the game the margins necessary to draw out my speculations. The "Hyper Light Drifter" was good at this. Even now, I cannot say exactly what the exact plot of that game was. How sad was the melancholy of the protagonist's struggle to protect their world in the face of a fatal disease. Solar Ash has none of that. The characters chatter, the world is littered with long audio logs, and the story is so horribly simplistic that most people could have predicted its peculiar turn of events from the start. Ray's little laugh when he pulls off the trick is hilarious.

The dialogue need not be at odds with the evocative storytelling. Appropriate language can enhance the mystique of the world and can imply meaning and depth to characters that cannot be read by sight alone. The dialogue in "Solar Ash" is not very good. It is all too descriptive or functional, and the character archetypes are too broad and paper-thin.

Visually, it is very rich, and its imagery is at times truly striking. The giant figure that tries to crush Rei throughout may be mysterious. A malevolent entity or an uncaring deity? Instead, the dialogue makes it clear who they are and what they want. Several encounters that follow the same plotline assure us of this. Our intrepid heroine also figures. The aforementioned twists and turns add a bit of complexity, but they only have the slightest effect of elevating Rei as a character. Why doesn't she talk about her hometown?" and "What is she fighting for?"

Speaking of fighting, the combat is indeed odd. Though simple, they are terribly unforgiving early in the game. A hit or two will send you back to the checkpoint, and it's hard to avoid attacks that come at you with slippery movements. Things don't get any easier; rather, there is a flurry of long sections that are completely effortless and others that are near nightmares. Still, it remains satisfying when you get it right. Sliding around the room and knocking down enemies is really cool, and the game rewards you if you can live up to its promise. When it comes to skating, Solar Ash manages to keep it exhilarating enough to be worth the price of admission on its own.

It reminded me of The Pathless. Both have a strong art style while pursuing a profound sense of movement. Solar Ash fails to harmonize its means of navigation and feels stationary except for skating; in The Pathless, flying, sprinting, and sliding all cascade together, allowing you to move across the map for miles. Both games have a repetitive structure, but Solar Ash feels much more pronounced. It's the similar bosses and the simplistic, unvaried puzzles; The Pathless was wise to limit the combat to boss fights, but Solar Ash should have learned from some of its influences from other games.

The bosses are a bit disappointing. They are spectacular. It's a really huge giant, an island unto itself. Avoiding it as it weaves in and out of the landscape and tries to crush you is one of the best moments of the game. But once you are on the giant's body, you are indistinguishable from the obstacles you had to overcome to get there, and you have to run down its back to exploit its various weaknesses until you are allowed to stab it in the eye. To have to do that three times each time seems to overestimate how much of a battle this is.

By blatantly evoking "Wanda and the Colossus," there is little back and forth between you and your enemy, exposing the lack of any real struggle and only further hurting you. Team Ico's masterpiece nailed the David and Goliath feeling. It certainly makes you feel tiny and helpless, but it also allows you to fail. We can fall down, we can fall down, but we can get back up. One wrong step on Solar Ash and you are relegated to the nearest save point and have to start all over again. By making the bosses such an obstacle course, they were reduced to an artificial entity. I never felt like I was in a fight to the death with a giant enemy. Animatronic limbs flailed about and sound effects complimented my tricks. Still, I had a fair amount of fun, probably because the game does a good job of recreating the feeling of skating.

In other words, it's not bad by any means. In fact, it's fun all around and the skating is great. I just couldn't help but feel like something more weighty was missing, and Hyper Light Drifter haunts me like a broken memory, trying to piece it together even after all these years. This is already a half-remembered dream. A pleasant dream, but one that will soon be gone. My kingdom for the game of Solar Ash might have been.