Solar ash is ready to be a fast, silky smooth action platformer of Hyper Light Drifter studio Heart Machine, and now there’s a trailer to prove it.
Heart Machine showed off for the first time Solar ash in June at Sony’s big PlayStation 5 gaming event, but we didn’t get a good look at the gameplay until today’s live stream. The Solar ash gameplay trailer features footage captured on PS5, revealing a sprawling setting with Rei, a Voidrunner on a mission to save her planet from a world devouring black hole. Gameplay is fast and fluid, with a focus on skating over the ashen clouds and jumping between platforms, taking down enemies along the way.
Hyper Light Drifter was a great 2D action RPG that came out in 2016, and Solar ash is a faithful evolution of creative director Alx Preston’s aesthetic. It turns the studio’s signature neon-lined, glowing art style into a 3D environment, placing a small but mighty protagonist at the center of a vast and terrifying world.
Solar ash is coming to PlayStation 4, PS5 and the Epic Games Store later this year. It is published by Annapurna Interactive.
Hyper Light Drifter co-designer Teddy Dief is also working on a new project, We are OFK, with their studio at Palmtree Team. We are OFK is a musical interactive series about four friends in their early twenties trying to make a band in modern Los Angeles, and it has a distinctly more pastel palette than Hyper Light Drifter – or Solar ash, for that matter.