Ambrosia Sky’s Developers Grapple With Grief And Love In Their Upcoming Sci-Fi Adventure

Soft Rains’ upcoming debut game Ambrosia Sky has been described as a sci-fi take on Powerwash Simulator. That’s not an inaccurate description in some ways, but it’s also not the full story. For as much as Ambrosia Sky is about cleaning up after the wreckage, it’s also about discovering what people and communities leave behind when they’re gone.

“Dalia, our protagonist, is coming home for the first time in 15 years to do a job about death cleanup and saying goodbye to people she knows,” Kaitlin Tremblay, Ambrosia Sky’s narrative director, tells Inverse. “Going through an environment, cleaning it up, taking care of the space echoes the theme of taking care of people even in death. How do we say goodbye to people? How do we take care of each other and our space?”

In Ambrosia Sky, Dalia is a Scarab, a person who’s sent in to clean up wreckage sites while laying the victims to rest. And in this case, Dalia is performing her duties as a cleaner, a coroner, and a witness to the dead in a place she used to call home but has long since left. By necessity, it’s a lonely task, but she still has company of a sort. Dalia’s ultimate goal is to perform final rites for the victims, which involves hearing from the deceased directly.

“We care about fictional worlds because we connect to the people that inhabit them,” Tremblay says. “So I did try to give a lot of voice to the world through the people that you can't do anything for other than witness their end. And for me there’s something beautiful about prose and writing that has to evoke unimaginable things, especially with a game like Ambrosia Sky that has to dip into cosmic horror.”

The recent demo for Ambrosia Sky ends with one of those burial rites, which Dalia performs for a person she used to know well. It’s a centerpiece for the demo as the rites will be in the final game and a lot of work has gone into making them feel important and distinct from anything else you encounter along the way, including depicting them in an entirely different, comic book-inspired art style.

“We wanted them to look really different from the rest of the game,” art director Adam Volker tells Inverse. “And I’m really happy we did. The comic book panel approach lets us get a gestalt for the character and the moment in a way that’s really magical.”

To get to that moment, though, you need to make your way through the wreckage of a ship infested with an aggressive alien fungus. That’s where the Powerwash Simulator comparisons come in, as Dalia uses a suite of chemical sprayers to dispatch with various types of fungus, carving her way through the ship to find her target. And to design all the strange species now piled up in the ships Dalia explores, Soft Rains had plenty of real-world knowledge to draw on.

“Our team is big fungi fans,” Volker says. “They really are big into foraging so there was tons and tons of inspiration to build off of. We wanted them to feel true to Earth fungus, but not from our planet. We also wanted to make sure the player could understand how they might behave and overlap and that actually sets really beautiful creative guardrails.”

Most of Ambrosia Sky unfolds in the cleaning process, as Dalia moves from room to room cutting through the infection. Like in other job simulator games, the mundane action of cleaning eventually becomes a kind of meditation, its repetitive nature giving you space to think about exactly why you’re here.

“I actually feel like the story and gameplay are an unexpectedly natural fit,” Volker says. “The cleaning is so slow and methodical, it’s given me a lot of time to reflect on what I'm there to do and how I feel about it while I'm making sure every nook and cranny is clean. It's like you can switch your mind off of what the current task is and think about the context and the theme of the story.”

As she searches through the scenes she’s been sent to clean, Dalia will also encounter other lost members of the ship’s crew, in the form of journals they’ve left behind. While text logs sometimes get a bad rap as storytelling devices in games, they’re all over the place in Ambrosia Sky, giving character to the world by explaining how people spent their final moments.

“I like text logs,” Tremblay says. “I think they’re unfairly maligned. I didn't want Dalia just uncovering people who have died. I want the people who have died to feel like they were active agents in trying to save themselves. How did they support each other? What were the tensions that existed here? So they created this really interesting opportunity to drill down into how people face disaster together.”

That, ultimately, is the question that comes across strongest so far from Ambrosia Sky. Amid all its doom and alien mushrooms, it’s a story concerned with how people come together in crises to support one another and what they can offer to each other. Tremblay says they made a point to let potential new team members know early on that they would be thinking a lot about death during development, and both they and Volker say the closeness of the team allowed them to help each other through the heavier feelings that arose during the process.

But Ambrosia Sky still carries the weight of grief, focusing as it does on the aftermath of tragedy and what remains of a person after their demise. At the same time, it’s a game about the importance of human connection and the way people can come together when it really matters. So for Volker and Tremblay, has working on such a project changed how they think about community and grief?

“I haven't connected these dots until you asked that question,” Volker says. “But my father passed away in December. And now I'm thinking a lot about his memory and remembering the people that are close to me. I’m thinking about how we honor people after they’re gone and how important that is.”

The process of working on Ambrosia Sky stirred similarly personal feelings in Tremblay.

“I started in games being an active part of different queer communities here in Toronto and doing a lot of event organizing,” they say. “I ascribe a lot of my place in the industry to being a part of communities and giving back. I've gone through a lot of deaths in my life and it's always stood with me how much it matters that we support each other in those moments. So for me, it's just solidified how special it is when we have community and how much our love for each other does.”