Hyper Light Drifter dev’s acrobatic action-adventure Solar Ash gets October release date • Eurogamer.net

Hyper Light Drifter developer Heart Machine’s gorgeous sci-fi action-adventure Solar Ash finally has a release date and will be heading to PlayStation and PC on 26th October.

Announced back in 2019 under the working title Solar Ash Kingdom, Heart Machine’s latest adventure takes players to a “surreal, vivid and highly stylised world filled with mystery, wild high-speed traversal, endearing characters, and massive enemy encounters” as they, in the role of Voidrunner Rei, attempt to save their home planet from the Ultravoid – a massive black hole that swallows entire worlds.

In more practical terms, Solar Ash (which trades Hyper Light Drifter’s intricate top-down pixel art for a fully 3D world) is a third-person action-platformer with a focus on “fluidity of movement”. Players are able to quickly leap, slide, grind, and grapple across huge distances as they explore the likes of sunken cities, vast water shelves, and dangerous lava zones, battling ever-more fearsome enemies along the way.

“As you progress, you’ll encounter larger and more twisted creatures, hinting at the more insidious nature of this maw of the cosmos,” Heart Machine explained back in February. “These encounters will only escalate in challenge and scale the deeper you explore, requiring greater timing and fine platforming skills to complete.”

And if Solar Ash’s exploratory platform action manages to instil the same sense of wonder and surprise as its acclaimed predecessor, we’ll be in for a real treat. All will be revealed when it launches for PlayStation 4, PS5, and PC (via the Epic Games Store) on 26th October.