Solar Flair
Heart Machine’s elegant action-platformer redefines open-world traversal
Heart Machine’s followup to Hyper Light Drifter aims to move you in more ways than one
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
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.”
There is some connective tissue between the two games. The colour palette for starters, with its magenta and cyan tones complemented by pastel shades, as you hurtle past pink-leaved trees and zip across platforms set against expansive peachesand-cream skies. And Rei is similar to the Drifter in many ways: both are mysterious,
THIS ISN’T A GAME WHERE YOU’LL WANT TO SLOW DOWN TOO OFTEN. “YEAH, WE’RE TELLING THE PLAYER: GO FAST”
masked nomads, sporting brightly coloured capes, and both share that same combination of vulnerability and poise. That conviction was reflected through the Drifter’s swift, precise actions during combat encounters; here, Rei’s particular set of skills affords her, and the player, the ability to express herself through movement.
We’re introduced to her as she skates up a flight of steps. As far as we can tell, there are no wheels on her heels, but she hurtles up them within a matter of seconds. Then she’s somersaulting and dashing across an undulating, teal-coloured nimbus, through which buildings protrude; often broken, sometimes jutting out at strange angles. Accelerating up a slope, she latches onto a floating green grapple point, zipping across to a dark, gooey substance on a wall, which she grips easily as she clambers up and over the top. Here, a bulbous enemy awaits; as it strikes the ground, Rei leaps over the jagged shockwave before dispatching the creature in a handful of quick, dismissive slashes. Over an archipelago of floating platforms she runs, leaps and dashes, a hero in perpetual motion, always moving forward.
Making Rei’s movement joyful was Preston’s main target from the very start, and it shows. “Traversal is the main component that we’ve focused on from early on,” he says. “You know, between the different actions that Rei can take, the boosting mechanics that she has, and all the different motions and physical reactions to things – it feels good to flow through this world. And that’s very intentional.” Despite the scale of Solar Ash’s environments and the freedom you have to explore, he hesitates before referring to it as an open-world game. “We’re talking more about like an actionplatformer style, because it cares about your jumps, it cares about the weight of the character. You know, how it feels to navigate things, and grind on rails, and so on.”
Many of these elements are familiar, from its playful approach to gravity, which nods towards a Nintendo classic (“the very stupid pitch early on was ‘Mario Galaxy meets Shadow Of The Colossus’,” Preston laughs) to Gravity Rush’s exhilarating movement. In the relative compactness of its open spaces, we’re also reminded a little of another
Annapurna property, The Pathless – yet your momentum here isn’t nearly so easily arrested. Which isn’t to say attaining such easy flow is quite as straightforward as Preston’s making it look, but outside the odd interior setting where you can take a breather, this isn’t a game where you’ll want to slow down too often. After all, he says, “We have two different buttons for ‘go’.” (Or, if we’re being pedantic, a button and a trigger.) Game director Chelsea Hash interjects: “It’s like ‘go’ and ‘go harder’.” Preston laughs. “Yeah, we’re telling the player: go fast.”
We observe that it feels like a game made for speedrunners, and ask whether it was a major consideration while creating the world – another to add to the increasing list of beautiful post-apocalypses. In fact, Hash says, it became particularly pertinent to the way the Remnant encounters were designed – “though we’re not cutting things because they’re not [designed] for speedrunners, or saying, ‘OK, this is for speedrunners, and this is for regular players’. I hope it’s fun for people that don’t necessarily bowl through games with that confidence. So it’s a love letter to speedrunners. You all have a speedrunner inside you!”
Preston, meanwhile, expresses delight at the ways he’s seen the speedrunning community break his previous game during GDQ events and the like. “It’s more a matter of not quashing the cool things for them,” he says. “And anyone can pick up on what we’re trying to motivate you to do, which is to move quickly through [the world]. I think the best analogue is something like Mario. As a kid, I was essentially trying to speedrun through those things – the way that Mario moves is very engaging and compelling, and compels you to move quickly.”
Invoking Nintendo’s mascot is a risky move for a developer making a platformer of any stripe, but the comparison isn’t unwarranted, particularly for a game with a similar focus on making traversal enjoyable in its own right. It’s apparent in the way Rei moves, of course, but you can see it in the world design, which helps facilitate that sense of flow while affording leeway for a little creative expression along the way. Arrangements of platforms, trails of collectibles, floating grapple points,
grippable surfaces and enemy positions may suggest obvious routes to go down, but it’s not too fussy about how you get there.
And it’s also like Mario in the sense that Rei’s full moveset is in place from the start. “Sure, there are interesting things that [Mario] encounters in the world that change that context, but he doesn’t really unlock new moves like Banjo Kazooie, or something like that,” Preston elaborates. There will, however, be different suits that Rei finds that will be transformative in some way, though he’s coy as to how (“it might not be exactly what you’re thinking, perhaps”). But there are no stamina upgrades, for example (such a mechanic was considered and thrown out) and very few restrictions on Rei’s abilities. “The only [thing], if you could even call it a limit, is we have a boost economy so that you time your boosts,” Hash says. “Otherwise, we’re more interested in letting the player have more freedom than trying to constrain them when it comes to traversal,” Preston adds.
That said, scattered across each biome you’ll find Dregs, thick, oily masses which you need to purge in much the way you do the area’s boss – whose attention is aroused once you’ve dispelled enough of this horrible sludge. It’s not simply a matter of whacking the pins again, but doing so while those squiggles of energy are still pulsing away between them. That monochromatic finisher bears repeating, though Hash points out that the challenges you face in each area aren’t simply copy-pasted or procedurally generated, even if the game does have some procedurality, in both its systems and its animation. “Another thing I’d call out is just how intentionally handcrafted these experiences are,” she says. “We don’t have a lot of low-grade repetition. We built something that was worth finding and worth seeing in each step, and it really has some of that indie blood of intentionality.”
Preston grins. “Yeah, we’re not a collectfest. It’s not Donkey Kong 64 or Assassin’s Creed. Sorry to disappoint you.”
Despite that, there are some things to pick up: the globs of plasma that you find lining grind rails, or come across while skating across the surface of those clouds, for starters. These, Preston suggests, will be used to unlock “some fun things, visually
“WE DON’T HAVE A LOT OF LOW-GRADE REPETITION. WE BUILT SOMETHING THAT WAS WORTH FINDING AND SEEING IN EACH STEP”
and mechanically. [But I] can’t dig into it too much more.”
But the most important currency is the Starseed Energy you gather from Dregs and Remnants, used ultimately to power a huge landmark in the centre of the world. From a vantage point at the edge of a skyscraper, it looks a long way away, but it still draws the eye – a towering spire above which we see an orb of light with two broken rings around it, only one of which is still spinning.
There’s certainly nothing to get in the way of the view. A tiny circular health gauge in the top-left corner, for the rare occasions an enemy manages to land a strike as you flit around them, is barely noticeable. A similarly small counter in the top-right keeps track of your plasma tally, but otherwise the display is clutter-free. Your natural curiosity should lead you to the various Dregs and other points of interest without the need of any waypoint markers, though either way you’re unlikely to get as lost here as you could on occasion in Hyper Light Drifter. “We do have a ping system,” Preston says. “If you want some clear objectives, you can go to one of these specific places and get the data for it so that you can have waypoints for yourself on a ping.” By the same token, he’s hoping most players won’t really feel the need to use it too often, instead relying on architecture, sightlines and set-pieces to guide them naturally. “We have a lot of really great artists on the team. So it’s about trying to keep these places interesting and engaging, and, yeah, players should want to explore this stuff. So it’s a mix of both: more clear waypoints and just good level and art design.”
Combining the grace of a gymnast with an athlete’s strength and agility, Rei makes navigating this fractured world look easy. But when Preston points out that Solar Ash has been in development for four years and counting, we’re reminded that a lot of effort goes into making something look effortless. While several colleagues who made Hyper Light Drifter remained after Heart Machine’s debut launched (including art lead Cosimo Galluzzi, animator Sean Ward and composer Rich ‘Disasterpeace’ Vreeland), there were gaps to plug and more roles to fill given the increased scope and ambition of the studio’s next game. “It’s been quite a path,” Preston admits. “The game took some time to find itself, which is why it’s been so deep in development, but also building the team and transitioning to 3D and Unreal took a good amount of effort and expertise.”
Hash has been a key part of that, joining Heart Machine initially as a tech artist, before assuming the role of game director. “I joined in 2017,” she tells us. “I was putting together the adaptation of the aesthetics and art style into the 3D world, building a shader rendering environment, bringing in additional resources that sort of change the Unreal Engine – we weren’t just using simplifications of what was delivered – and then building up the level design tools.” In the early days, she says, it was about making people who’d become accustomed to working in 2D comfortable with realising their intentions in three dimensions. “Like, a big thing is the stacked worlds. The verticality is something that was not available out of the box,” she says.
The biggest challenge for the team (which on any given day is around 20 strong, Preston says) has been winnowing down various ideas and systems to pinpoint and focus on the very best ones. It’s a process that’s involved a lot prototyping, Hash says. “When you put it against other open-world games, I feel like a lot of the larger studios have a lot of people making a lot of small things, whereas we made a lot of small explorations,” she says. “But then, as we’ve been shipping, we’ve been folding them on top of themselves to make a few core systems that we’re really in love with – so transitioning from making small prototypes that feel good in isolation, watching them work in separation and then consolidating them into something accessible.”
The scope of the game has grown and shrunk several times during development, Preston says; settling on core systems that feel good and flow together has involved a lot of tough decisions on what to cut. “Killing your darlings!” he says. “I mean, yeah, you don’t want to throw everything and the kitchen sink in there. It’s that curation, that authorship that really matters, and especially for a project of this magnitude with a team of this size, you know, your
SETTLING ON CORE SYSTEMS THAT FEEL GOOD AND FLOW TOGETHER HAS INVOLVED A LOT OF TOUGH DECISIONS ON WHAT TO CUT
“MOVING ACROSS THE LEVEL AS QUICKLY AS THIS… THERE’S NO HORSE IN THIS GAME. YOU ARE YOUR OWN FAST-TRAVEL SYSTEM”
eyes can definitely be hungrier than what your guts can actually sustain.” Yet while in one sense he’d love to have “another 17 artists”, he also likes the close-knit feeling of having a team of this size, where everyone feels they have a significant impact on the game. “We built the kind of tools that allowed the level designers to contribute to art. And the artists are contributing to gameplay as they make custom flow,” Hash adds. “I think having everybody have a slash next to their name so that they’re all pushing the experience forward is really special to watch.”
That sense of forward momentum is reflected in the game. We remark that we’ve not seen an open-world game with such a keen focus on traversal since Spider-Man; it’s no great surprise when Hash reveals the team has been using Houdini, the same tools with which Insomniac built the webslinger’s world. “But instead of having as much of the proceduralism as they used, what we’re doing is to use it as a level editor, so the environment artists can create huge amounts of objects that can be sustainably updated throughout the entire development.”
Finding efficient ways to progress is at the heart of Solar Ash’s creation, then, and so it is with the game itself. Which isn’t to say you’ll always be looking towards your next major goal when Rei’s movement in combination with the world design makes it so inviting to simply explore. “Having these clear objectives and then layering on moments that are truly discoverable without being overtly tracked – that gives players of different energy levels and different motivations things to find,” Hash says, while Preston emphasises that the game’s relative compactness and crafted quests should ensure Solar Ash avoids ever descending into familiar open-world drudgery.
By the same token, when a protagonist feels as good as Rei to control, there’s no need to skip anything. “Having the player be able to pursue their objectives at pace, moving across the level as quickly and expressively as this… there’s no horse in this game. Like, you are your own fast-travel system,” Hash says. “You are your own horse!” Preston adds. “That’s the box quote.” Sorry, Agro – it turns out we’re more than capable of taking down these colossi alone.