So it's the fast-paced traversal of The Pathless with the puzzle-ish boss fights of Shadow of the Colossus.

The boss battles involve scaling the massive bodies and stabbing their weak spots. Once you do enough of these, the boss is ready to fight. You enter a new area, solve a bunch of puzzles to clear it of the black sludge plaguing it. You move around using Rei's jet boots to skate around massive levels and grind on rails. The game is segregated into six different biomes each with their own central gimmicks and themes. The core gameplay of Solar Ash involves fast-paced platforming broken up by slower puzzle challenges, punctuating in a show-stopping boss fight. Their previous game Hyper Light Drifter was very much a homage to classic 2D Zelda games, and Solar Ash immediately resembles Team Ico's seminal game Shadow of the Colossus with a little bit of another Annapurna-published puzzle platformer The Pathless - which I guess also had Colossus vibes (clearly there's some kind of unofficial Team Ico revival happening at Annapurna Interactive and I'm here for it). Heart Machine is clearly a studio that wears their influences on their sleeves. Thus begins a somewhat familiar-feeling adventure about slaying massive beasts and saving the world. As she awakes, however, her entire team has vanished and the massive inky beasts stand between her and her goal. Rei's home planet is at risk of being sucked into the Ultravoid (a very large black hole) and it is up to her to activate a device called the Starseed that will save her planet from this fate. Wasting absolutely no time, it places you in the shoes of a voidrunner named Rei, who uses advanced technology to explore black holes.

Solar Ash begins, as many games do, with its protagonist waking up confused in a strange space.

Solar ash game review