Take nothing less than the supreme best
The act of transitioning from one place to another has been at the centre of what we do in videogames ever since starships traced lines across the screen in Steve Russell’s Spacewar! nearly 60 years ago. And yet, in much the same way as we don’t think very much about the physical act of walking, we don’t give much conscious attention to movement on the screen. Until, that is, it doesn’t feel right. We certainly noticed it in the late ’80s and early ’90s as western developers in particular tried and failed to come up with platform games whose heroes moved like Mario, turning out countless examples with about as much finesse as a bag of potatoes. It’s not just about the locomotion of things with arms and legs, either – we’ve seen it a great deal, too, in most open-world games that have tried to stand against the GTA series, each one fumbling the quite important bit involving vehicle handling, turning out something that always feels a bit like playing around with toy cars in comparison to Rockstar’s endlessly satisfying implementation. And there’s nothing much to be ashamed of here: doing this stuff really successfully is complicated and time-consuming. Which is why it’s such good news that Heart Machine has it right at the top of its list of priorities for this issue’s cover star, Solar Ash.
That’s also meant that the game has already been in production for four years, and its release is still a little way off. But if you played Heart Machine’s debut, the mesmerising, meticulously crafted Hyper Light Drifter, you wouldn’t expect the studio’s next release to be kicked out of the door at the earliest opportunity. We’ll have to be patient.
As we wait, we consider digging out Sunset Overdrive, Super Mario Galaxy and 1080° Snowboarding – three games with different types of movement but with equal attention paid to how they feel in the player’s hands. Then the fizzing Returnal arrives, we instantly fall for its fluid yet razor-sharp flow, and it gets added to the list. Is Solar Ash destined to sign up, too? We weigh up its prospects beginning on p60.