And Rei is clad in similar clothing to the hero of Hyper Light Drifter, with a pink cape fluttering in her wake.
Its vistas are similarly shattered, but the pieces hang in the sky, as if someone had paused life at the moment of impact. It took me longer to warm to Solar Ash, though it is clearly the visual twin of its predecessor. Its setting was one of apocalyptic science fiction: high-tech cities, smashed to ruin and spat on with rain, and a hero with a laser sword of swishing cyan. It was steeped in the imagery of The Legend of Zelda -high cliffs, swords, and garments of telling colour-but it took on a darker hue. His studio is named Heart Machine (how’s that for making art from one’s suffering?), and Solar Ash, like Hyper Light Drifter before it, moves with an irregular beat. Preston was born with a congenital heart condition, and I can scarcely shake the image of him-from a Vice documentary about the making of that game-ingesting a fistful of pills in a single gulp. Solar Ash is the second game from Alx Preston, whose previous work, Hyper Light Drifter, was a heartfelt thing, indeed-literally: its hero kept clutching at his chest and coughing up puddles of blood. Think Jet Set Stranding, and you’re some of the way there. Her journey to that discovery is one that entails zooming through a series of shattered worlds, grinding on rails (Rei wears boots of gravity-flouting funkiness) and doing battle with a string of vast, oily bosses. To her surprise, however, she discovers that the void may have a heart. Similarly, Rei must plant something called a Starseed in the heart of the void. Rei is a Voidrunner, which, as far as I can tell, is like a professional roller skater, only padded with an array of responsibilities that puts her more in line with the crew of the Icarus II, from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, whose job it was to detonate a bomb on the sun’s surface and blow it back to life. It is only a matter of time before it is pulled in, and we get the sense that that is exactly what this game is: a matter of time. At the edge of the frame, we see her planet, as it is licked by the impenetrable gloom. At the start of Solar Ash, its heroine, Rei, floats on the cusp of a black hole.
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