PC
There’s no escaping the obvious X+Y format when describing the absolutely wonderful Ambrosia Sky. That’s because it’s absolutely Prey meets PowerWash Simulator, albeit with a smaller budget. And that works for me.
Dalia is a Scarab, a sort of investigative action-type who is returning to her former colony of stations situated around the rings of Saturn, trying to recover survivors and data after the outbreak of a fungal disease called Clusterlung. Not only do these spores infect humans and take over their bodies (not turning them into zombies, but simply killing them), but they are also growing in vast arrays around space stations, ships, satellites and outposts, and you’re here to clear them up.
However, rather than simply being PowerWash In Space, Ambrosia Sky takes much of its influences from immersive sims, most especially Prey. It’s not that epic or elaborate – I don’t want to over-inflate expectations – but it lifts enough neat ideas when it comes to exploration and navigation for it to feel impactful.
This is a level-based game, each mission in a different location, meaning sections are contained rather than sprawling. However, that’s not to say they’re small, because many are absolutely enormous. There are some huge space stations with multiple hubs, networks of doors and passageways you need to figure out how to unlock, all while cleaning up the fungal masses with your handy spray gun. Two levels (one in each of the two chapters) are set in open space, as you explore enormous structures and attempt to rewire them such that you can get inside and fix vital equipment, while recovering dead people’s DNA-storing data cards for something called Project Ambrosia.
As you get deeper, the types of fungus and the ways in which you eliminate them becomes more complicated, with types themed around explosives, electricity and the like. Your spray gun has infinite water, but gets more limited options for a more powerful spray, a flame thrower, and an electricity-conducting goop, all used for clearing bases and solving puzzles in innovative ways.
All this is plenty, and just the methodical pleasure of spraying rooms fiddled with fungal structures would keep me happy, but there’s a lot more going on here too. Fungi grow fruits, and these can be harvested (if you’re careful) and used for upgrades, making things far more tactical than just aiming a fire hose and waiting. But more importantly, all those im-sim elements mean you’re also figuring out how removing the electric fungi can fix an overloaded door, but only once you’ve worked out how to get another door open by finding a hidden passage and using your tether to pull yourself up a huge tower, before… That sort of thing. And yes, a grappling tether! Automatic extra 10% added to the score.
On top of all of this is the ongoing story, which is perhaps a little too esoteric in the wrong ways in the first act, but more esoteric in all the right ways in the second. Dalia left her girlfriend Maeve when she left the Cluster some years ago, and is wracked with guilt about this decision. Maeve remained and since led the effort to fight the disease rampaging through this Saturn colony, as you’ll discover through a billion emails read on terminals as you explore. This sense of loss and grief, while still believing she made the right decision, makes Dalia a far more interesting character to play. There’s also the even more complicated relationship she had with her stepmother, Hale Volkova, a controlling but ambiguously motivated leader in the colony, in conflict with Maeve, and bitter about Dalia’s leaving.
It’s important to be clear that this isn’t a fully realised immersive sim, but something smaller, more restricted, albeit plenty long and interesting. Levels being self-contained makes this feel more piecemeal, although it does have the advantage of letting you replay them after completing their story missions, returning to 100% the clean-up and find the hidden items in hard-to-reach places. And, while I’m griping, the tether really needs a bit more work – it can be frustrating as often as it’s satisfying, and I think there needs to be a little bit more lenience on letting you dramatically swing through doorways and gaps, rather than being pernickity about catching one pixel of a window frame.
Act 2, released recently, adds a good number of new ideas, including a whole new fungal type that really affects how you approach levels, and gives the story a satisfying and enormously peculiar ending. It’s interesting how it also takes the emphasis away from cleaning and more on exploration, which I think, after doing quite so much housework in the first half, was actually rather pleasant.
There’s nothing else like it, the story is intriguing, the voice acting fantastic, and oh my goodness the art is sublime, both in levels and in the stunningly drawn still cutscenes. The fact that this is all packed into a $25 game is remarkable, and well worth your eyes.
- Soft Rains / Blackbird Interactive
- Steam, Epic
- £17/$25/€18 (or just £12 on Epic)
- Official Site
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