Developers at the Heart Machine studio are currently working on Solar Ash, a game that has the same colorful visuals, ethereal sound design, and mysterious narrative as their premiere title, Hyper Light Drifter. Does this make Solar Ash a sequel, though, or just a spiritual successor attempting to expand on Hyper Light Drifter's unique gameplay and design philosophy?
Released in 2016, the action RPG Hyper Light Drifter was a game both modern and retro in style. The pixellated graphics and top-down gameplay hearkened back to early 1990's RPGs like The Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past, while the game's visual narrative, conveyed without dialogue or text, has the avante-garde flair of a modern indie title. In the game's setting, a science-fantasy world ravaged by a nightmarish apocalypse, a mysterious caped Drifter explores the ruins of the land, collecting powerful technological relics in the hopes of finding a cure to their illness.
The introductory trailer to Solar Ash centers around another caped wanderer, a lithe, feminine figure who glides across land and through space with their glowing roller-skate shoes (they also seem to have a spaceship). After a confrontation with an ethereal goddess-entity, they are cast into lands of beautiful ruins and distorted gravity, the surfaces of worlds devoured by the expanding Ultravoid. The gameplay on display retains the same motifs seen in Hyper Light Drifter; swift, graceful motion through a dangerous environment. Solar Ash even takes place in the same universe as Hyper Light Drifter, according to developers at Heart Machine. At first glance, Solar Ash is a sequel to Hyper Light Drifter in every way that matters... but there are distinct difference between these two Heart Machine games which grow more apparent when one takes a closer look.
Solar Ash Focuses On A Different Story and Set of Characters
According to Heart Machine's Twitter feed, Solar Ash takes place in the same universe as Hyper Light Drifter and "shares some of the same HLD" blood, but will "not be a direct sequel." Going by this statement, Solar Ash's story will likely focus on a new cast of characters who wander the half-broken worlds trapped within the ominously named "Ultravoid." The storytelling of Solar Ash will probably also employ more spoken dialogue than Hyper Light Drifter, judging by the lines uttered by the mysterious goddess-being featured in the introductory trailer. Finally, the stylized, abstract 3D graphics seen in the trailers for Solar Ash bear a closer resemblance to indie games like Journey rather than older games like the Legend of Zelda.
Solar Ash Has A Larger Setting With a More Cosmic Scope
In Hyper Light Drifter, players wander through the different realms of a broken land, but Solar Ash, by all accounts, will be about a psychedelic journey through a broken universe. The Ultravoid, the golden-rimmed Black Hole seen in the introductory trailer, threatens to swallow every world, and the fast-gliding protagonist of Solar Ash voluntarily hurls themselves into its twisted depths. Are they searching for a way to stop the Ultravoid's expansion, or retrieve something it consumed? Whatever their goal, the hero of Solar Ash must roller-skate through larger, open fields of terrain while confronting monsters and "the remnants that bristle with hunger," beings much larger in scale than the enemies of Hyper Light Drifter.
Solar Ash Explores More Hopeful Themes Than Hyper Light Drifter
The Drifter, the protagonist of Hyper Light Drifter, is dying, stricken by a chronic, fatal illness that causes them to periodically cough of up blood. The Drifter's desperate struggle to survive both the threats in their brutal world and the betrayal of their stricken body was directly inspired by developer Alx Preston's own struggle with lifelong health issues: indeed, the name of his game studio, Heart Machine, is a direct allusion to his chronic heart problems.
Solar Ash, in contrast, has been described as an indie game with a more "hopeful" story, featuring moments of peaceful reflection to balance out the scenes of conflict and peril. As the protagonist and the other lost souls within the Ultravoid explore and fight through the "Spiral of Despair," they will turn to each other for solace, and rely on each other for the strength needed to break free.
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