Late last night I stood in a floating church, looking up through the bones of the shattered ceiling towards the sky, where an island hung above me. The island was facing downwards, so where there should be stars, I saw patchy grass and the tops of noble pines. It was beautiful and teasing and I wondered how to get there.
This is Solar Ash, and Solar Ash is a skating game, really. It’s a cosmic skating game with spectacular rinks and it absolutely does not want you to stop moving even for a second. You ghost frictionlessly over the landscape here, a thing of will and direction only. The earth curves away in strange, promising pathways. Connection is forgiving – even grind rails have a sort of mag-lev dreaminess to them, so you can hop on and off without much in the way of fiddliness. The sky is very clear and the ground is often cloud, soft duvet mounds of pearly blue that will hold you up but which, brilliantly, still see you disappearing into the blurred depths for a few early seconds before momentum carries you back to the surface. Dunked in a cloud: not a bad start to the day.
