Solar Ash's sweeping combat
Solar Ash is the second game from Heart Machine, the independent developer team that turned out Hyper Light Drifter. Though both titles are science fiction/fantasy adventures set in brightly-colored worlds, they're drastically different in how they let players move and fight through their worlds.
In Hyper Light Drifter, the titular Drifter character is controlled in a top-down camera view. Combat is designed around paying attention to enemy movements in a system with a high skill floor and equally high skill ceiling. Enemies have recognizable attack patterns, but those patterns move quick and hit hard.
You would think a studio that mastered this kind of combat system would want its next game to build on such a system (especially while From Software continues to pump more life into similar systems in games like Elden Ring and the Dark Souls 3), but that's not what happened. Solar Ash is a 3D game more invested in player traversal than tight combat. But that's okay, because it uses its smooth traversal system as combat.
Solar Ash's player character, "Rei," glides across alien landscapes, relying on a simple attack and grappling hook to strike down smaller enemies. These are just stepping stones on the way to fighting Remnants--huge creatures standing in the way of the Rei being able to save her homeworld.
What led Heart Machine to design a brand-new combat system? How does going from 2D to 3D spaces create different kinds of difficulty? Alx Preston, co-founder of Heart Machine, and creative director on both titles, talked to Game Developer about how the studio evolved its thinking on combat design, and explained how the team came to take a different point of view on difficulty.
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