Ambrosia Sky: Act One Sets Up A Captivating Look At Grief In A Sci-Fi World
A promising start for a somber sci-fi tale.
Death is everywhere in video games, but it’s rarely something we’re asked to think much about. It’s something to escape or inflict onto others, marking the end of your run in a roguelike or a goal to reach for in a competitive shooter. What’s explored much less often is what’s left behind, in the form of grief, memories, and physical remains, all of which in real life require careful handling and reflection. Ambrosia Sky: Act One grapples with those messier considerations while setting up a game that’s as enjoyable to play as it is thought-provoking.
In Ambrosia Sky, you play as Dalia, a woman returning home for the first time in 15 years. That home is the Cluster, a colony in the rings of Saturn where food grown on the back of a long-dead space-faring creature is used to feed humanity’s expansion into space. Dalia’s return is no typical homecoming, as she’s coming in her capacity as a Scarab, a group of scientists dispatched in the wake of catastrophe to collect DNA from the recently deceased in an attempt to study cellular decay and grant humans practical immortality.
Ambrosia Sky: Act One begins Dalia’s work recovering bodies of the fallen in her old home.
By the time Dalia arrives at the Cluster, she seems to be the only living person there. Massive fungal growths have taken over the colony, and the Cluster’s inhabitants have succumbed to clusterlung, a grisly condition that causes spores to root in victims’ lungs and sprout forth from their bodies. The mushrooms the colonists once grew as a food source are now not only consuming them, but also thwarting Dalia’s work.
Ambrosia Sky has been compared a lot to PowerWash Simulator, a comparison that makes a lot of sense on the surface, but feels less apt than it might seem in practice. Dalia is equipped with a tool to spray fluid that dissolves the mushrooms blocking her bath, allowing her to cut her way through the infected interior of the colony. It’s more akin to excavating a collapsed tunnel or even chiseling a statue than simply cleaning stains with a powerwasher, and to much different ends.
Carving your way through the fungus infecting your former home is a somber puzzle.
Work sims like PowerWash Simulator let players lose themselves in the comfort of repetition, where their minds can wander and recharge. Ambrosia Sky demands much more purpose in how you go about your work. You’re not trying to fully remove the fungal growths in the Cluster, but to carve a path through to do your true work. It’s much more of a puzzle here, as you’re rewarded for being careful enough to harvest fruit from the fungus without damaging it.
The effect that work is likely to have on you as a player is much different as well. Where part of the appeal of many work sims is the unfocused, relaxed state their repetitive action can impart, Ambrosia Sky is much more deliberate in guiding your attention. Only emails, journal entries, and alerts in the Cluster’s computer system remain for Dalia to piece together what exactly happened in her former home, giving you a lot to ponder as you carve your way through the Cluster. And everywhere you look, signs of its former inhabitants remain. Your goal here is to reach specific victims of the recent catastrophe, but other bodies litter the halls, too far gone to be of use to the Scarabs. Despite how grotesque they often are, the overall mood of Ambrosia Sky isn’t horror but melancholy, as Dalia ruminates on her former home and the people she left behind so long ago.
Dalia’s mission allows her a glimpse into the lives of the recently deceased.
As its subtitle should make clear, Ambrosia Sky: Act One is just the beginning of the game’s story. It does feel more like the first third of a complete game, rather than a self-contained story in itself, leaving its conclusion feeling a bit like a cliffhanger. The fact that the game isn’t complete is apparent throughout, with an upgrade tree that feels almost pointless, and a set of tools for cutting your way through the fungus that I almost never had a reason to touch while I played. And while there’s not much movement in the game’s story, the final few missions do introduce larger mysteries that will presumably be solved later.
Ambrosia Sky: Act One is ultimately a promising start, but not an entirely satisfying experience on its own. Its early missions feel limited and repetitive when played all in a row, but a few standouts — a zero-G approach on a stranded ship, a complex of mausoleums that seem to bend space around them — hint at much grander ambitions than picking through the halls of a single doomed colony. While its first act is just a hint of what the full game will be, I’m just as eager to see the environments developer Soft Rains cooks up for the rest of Ambrosia Sky as I am to continue Dalia’s funereal journey through her past.
