Over the past weekend, I checked out dozens of games across Summer Game Fest and the adjacent LA-based events, but none of them were quite like Ambrosia Sky.
It’s the debut title from Soft Rains, a Toronto-based studio that was co-founded by developers who have worked on the likes of Skyrim, Valorant, Watch Dogs: Legion and Left 4 Dead. But despite that significant AAA background, Ambrosia Sky feels like a remarkably unique and personal work.
That all starts with its premise. As the deep-space disaster specialist Dalia, your job is to investigate a crumbling space colony in the rings of Saturn. While there, you’ll have to contend with a mysterious alien fungus while laying the colony to rest. But what I quickly came to love about this setup is that it’s not about the obvious Alien-esque horror tropes of derelict spaceships overrun by fearsome organisms. Instead, it actually has more in common with PowerWash Simulator.
Using a high-tech sprayer, you’ll have to use different ammo types — ranging from basic water to fire and electricity — to dispose of the fungus. There are also different spray settings, allowing you to fine-tune your stream or even create something like a wide-reaching flamethrower. That’s to say nothing of the impressive versatility in how you can precisely remove specific parts of fungus or objects like explodable canisters you can tether and throw, as well as Zero-G environments in which your tether helps pull you around. There are even instances where you have to trace your own streams to create paths to power switches, which adds a welcome layer of problem-solving as I painted an electric path between a generator and a door.
In other words, Ambrosia Sky mixes that PowerWash-esque cathartic feeling of dealing with a mess (which Soft Rains amusingly calls a “clean ’em up”) with a puzzle-solving-like satisfaction of figuring out how to overcome the fungus and other obstacles. And matter how much was happening on screen at once, I didn’t encounter any technical issues, which feels remarkably impressive, especially for an indie game.
“I think the hard part comes in making sure that player expectations are met when you want to do something and the game’s like, ‘Yes, you can,'” says art director Adam Volker of the challenges of getting this all up and running. “And it’s always a bit about, ‘Okay, well, if electricity works and now it’s on fire, how do we want to handle that? How are the players going to expect to handle that?’ On top of all the really incredible programming work that our tech team is also doing just to make it function, make it perform, and make it make sense.”
Adding to all of that is the Unreal Engine 5-powered game’s striking painterly aesthetic. Volker, who’s worked on the Oscar-winning short film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and the Emmy-nominated VR title Manifest 99, says he was inspired by the likes Uruguayan cartoonist Matías Bergara (CODA) and Swedish artist Kilian Eng.
“We set out to make something that stood out and something that looked unique. When I started on the project, I was reading a bunch of what [narrative director] Kaitlin [Tremblay] had put down as far as the world-building and what they wanted to achieve there. And I felt like something that was more colourful and fantastic leaned more into the world that was being built,” says Volker.
“Our tech director said something that’s been really great to sort of summarize [our goal]: one of the difficult parts of our development is that we want a high level of density, but not a high level of detail. We’re gonna have a ton of fungus on the screen. We’re gonna have a lot of things for the player to parse and understand quickly. So we need really iconic designs and really saturated colours to help do that, so that playing is still really fun while you’re gonna be looking at so many things all at once.”
The graphic novel-esque visuals also help enhance the story that Ambrosia Sky aims to explore. The imagery of these comic panels — forever capturing a moment in time — goes hand-in-hand with what Soft Rains calls the “death rituals” for the fallen colonists. These poignant scenes will serve as celebrations of each character’s life while also helping to unravel the game’s broader mysteries. Joel Burgess, Soft Rains co-founder and studio head, notes that Tremblay wrote the acclaimed “death positive” game A Mortician’s Tale and wanted to continue to explore similar themes in Ambrosia Sky.
“We hit on the idea early on of jobs that have to deal with death are really ripe territory narratively. How we treat death and the dead in games is very casual. And when you look at games — whether it’s like Spiritfarer [from fellow Canadian developer Thunder Lotus] or [Kojima Productions’] Death Stranding — that are more thoughtful about how they respect and handle the dead, we thought that was an exciting place to tell stories,” says Burgess. “There’s something that is universally connected. Because no matter who you are, where you are, where you come from, death is a constant. And these conversations around death, when we think about our place in the universe and nature, are just really rich.”
Burgess adds that the fungus itself also ties into the speculative fiction story the team wanted to tell regarding alternative food sources, food scarcity and populating another planet. “What if we found mushrooms in our solar system? What would that mean for space exploration?” he muses. “And then, how would that sort of suffuse through a society and everything about how they make music and how they build things, and how they eat? So that all came into play as this melting pot of ideas.”
Chief among those ideas: the different kinds of blue collar workers that would exist within the framework of a not-too-distant future sci-fi setting. For Burgess, that mix of “cleaning and jobs in space” proved “really exciting” as a designer. “Players are legitimately interested in unconventional character fantasies and game mechanics, so there’s a lot of fertile territory there,” he says. “But we also come from a history of playing — and some of us making — games with really deep immersive simulation systems, those classic first-person adventure games. […] We found very few other games were doing this sort of cleaning blue collar job, and then doing this with the level of story and world building that we do.”
One of those games that did have some “similar ideas and sensibilities,” says Burgess, is Hardspace: Shipbreaker from Vancouver-based BlackBird Interactive (BBI). After chatting with a friend at BBI, Burgess says the two teams soon decided to collaborate on Ambrosia Sky. “You’d think the response to that kind of moment might be to close the door and go, ‘Okay, well, I guess we’re competing now.’ […] But I just love the fact that we have this collaboration,” he says.
Another big Canadian influence on Ambrosia Sky ended up being the “melting pots” (or “cultural mosaic” for Canada) he’s mentioned during our interview — in this case, of people and cultures within Toronto itself. Burgess cites one instance of walking through Trinity-Bellwoods with audio director Michelle Hwu and making note of “some of the history of the cluster and the different generations and how would they build musical instruments.” This, in turn, informed early conversations with composer Greg Harrison, who Burgess brought an attention to detail that included “procuring really specific instruments that felt like [they] would be used” here and now, but also making them fit in the futuristic world of Ambrosia Sky.
In a sense, that represents Soft Rains as a whole, a studio that is largely concentrated in Toronto but also brings together developers from Montreal, Vancouver and the U.S.
“[Toronto] has helped for some of those molecules bouncing off each other. Our team members are able to get together or other people who are parts of our Toronto gaming community as well, but then being able to also have those outside exposures and opinions as well,” says Burgess, who is a former American Bethesda developer and Canadian immigrant himself.
“So I do think, whether we’re talking about the gaming hubs in Montreal, Vancouver, in Toronto, elsewhere in Canada — that community that Toronto, Ontario, Canadian game developers can create is a crucible for better games, better ideas, better makers. And I don’t expect players to know or care where a game is made, but I think seeing that does merit attention from how we want to gather and create those melting pots for game developers.
This interview has been edited for language and clarity.
A release date for Ambrosia Sky has not yet been revealed, but the game is confirmed for a PC launch. A free demo is also available on Steam.
Image credit: Soft Rains
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