From the makers of Hyper Light Drifter comes Solar Ash Kingdom. Different name, same number of syllables. It's like they're writing some form of video game title haiku over there at Heart Machine.
Solar Ash Kingdom assumes the palette of its predecessor. Though when I say "predecessor" there's no indication that Solar is a sequel, spiritual or otherwise, to Hyper. Yet we're still dealing with ruined kingdoms and seemingly displaced peoples. There's a gravity defiance in the landscape, from the bleached dinosaur bones to the low-orbit space freighters. It doesn't look like anything new has been built in a hundred years.
Except for our sky-blading protagonist. Who's here to deal with the enormous eyeballs of their world. It looks like in this world of ruin and stagnation, movement is life.
While low poly art styles have a hard time winning me over, I'm going to give Heart Machine the space to do whatever it needs to do. It can do whatever it wants because its first game, Hyper Light Drifter, is one of my favorite games of this generation. It single-handedly reframed my appreciation of top-down pixel art action role-playing games. Also, I've only got a 500 GB PlayStation 4. I have to uninstall games on there to make room for new games all the time—all the time. Not Hyper Light Drifter, though. It stays.
Who knows when Solar Ash Kingdom will launch. But when it does, it looks like the Epic Game Store sealed an exclusivity deal with Heart Machine. You have until then to get over your Steam-or-Bust consumer protest.
