Solar Ash’s world and combat can’t keep up with its incredible movement

Solar Ash is a visually stunning though mechanically uninteresting game that I tried and failed to fall in love with. I thought it’d be easy to love or at least somewhat like a game made by the same folks who developed Hyper Light Drifter and published by the company that underwrote indie darlings Kentucky Route Zero and What Remains of Edith Finch. But after a couple hours of grav-boosting my way through colorful but sterile environments and beating on the same handful of enemies, Solar Ash just couldn’t hold me — and that’s a shame since most things with Ash in its name are pretty neat.

In Solar Ash, you play a voidrunner tasked with saving your planet from the black hole that’s slowly sucking in your homeworld like my dog thinks will...