Copyright Polygon
I used to think of death as little more than a fleeting instant. You’re there one second, and you’re gone the next. Quick, simple. It was a scary thought, sure, but comforting in a strange way too. When you die, there is nothing left to worry about. There’s no fallout to deal with. You just exit into a blissful state of nonexistence. But the more I’ve grown, and the more I’ve been exposed to real death as loved ones pass away, the more I know that it can leave a mess in its wake. Those left mourning can spend years, if not a lifetime, sorting through the wreckage left behind after an unexpected tragedy. In Ambrosia Sky, that experience comes to life in a fascinating sci-fi premise. The debut game from developer Soft Rains puts players in the helmet of an intergalactic cleaner who is sent to tidy up spaceships that have turned into gravesites for crews killed by an invasive fungus. With a promising first act launching on Nov. 10, and the next two parts arriving in 2026, the “clean-’em up” is already building a weighty work of atmospheric sci-fi that I’m willing to follow to its conclusion next year. I just hope it gets a bit of a deep clean of its own before then. Ambrosia Sky is a first-person shooter (technically speaking!) that smashes Metroid Prime and PowerWash Simulator together. Act One, which consists of a handful of missions spanning three or four hours of playtime, largely acts as an introduction to that unique hybrid. Each job tosses players onto a small ship which is caked in fungus. To extract whatever you’re tasked with grabbing from the ship, you need to clear a path through the mess by using a spray gun. Crafting materials can even be harvested out of the fungus by carefully cutting around it with the hose. It’s a premise that takes the satisfying joys of cleaning a dirty object in PowerWash Simulator, but finds a way to adapt that idea into spatial puzzles. The missions featured in the first batch show that the hook isn’t just a one-trick pony. My earliest gig is straightforward, having me cut a path through corridors and destroy electrified growths so I can safely move to my destination. Another has me using my grapple beam to tether into vents and find a way around locked doors. The clear standout of the bunch, though, has me floating around a giant spaceship in zero gravity as I clean gunk off it to find a way inside. It’s pure puzzle-box bliss that’s unlike anything else in Act One. I hope there’s more like it coming in the next set of missions. The clever shooter-puzzle hook is enough to pull me in already, but it’s the added weight from the emerging narrative that’s going to keep me invested for Act Two. As I explore these derelict ships, all of which have the same eerie isolation as Metroid Prime’s Pirate Frigate, I’m not just learning more about the fungus plague and the research project I’ve been tasked to help out with; I’m learning about the people who died there. I find corpses lying in the lifeless halls, some buried under growth. In those moments, I feel like a member of a biohazard service called to remove a body from a hoarder’s home. Every ship is a maze of detritus to conquer. I can glean some insight into who these people were through email terminals. Some of the deaths seem to be accidental; others refused to leave their home as the health threat took hold. These stories are sometimes small, but I’m given just enough to piece together a picture of the people who died here. Act One’s ending implies that the personal nature of its storytelling is only just starting, with a wider narrative about a religious cult sprouting in the final mission of the batch, but I hope Act Two doesn’t stray too far from those quiet reflections on death. There’s a lot that I do hope to see tweaked come 2026’s updates, though. Ambrosia Sky Act One is an early access release in everything but name. It features some UI quirks that still could use polishing. Its onboarding isn’t too elegant, with several missions leaving me stumped as I struggled to figure out how to approach an unexplained puzzle element that’s dropped into a mission suddenly. Some of its finer systems don’t seem entirely cooked yet either. I’m able to craft upgrades to my water gun by gathering materials, and even create fire and shock ammo. I never found an application where I’d need to use the latter, while the former only came in handy to find a few collectibles hidden behind a specific kind of growth that hardly appears in the initial missions. I imagine all of that will come together more later, but it’s a bit strange that Act One has you unlocking several tools that barely have a use yet. It feels less like a defined chapter and more like a chunk carved off a game at random to help fund development of the rest. I can only trust that Soft Rains has a long-term vision here. Act One already finds the studio marrying the sci-fi atmosphere of Metroid Prime to somber, human stories. I’m properly gripped by the story and am eager to see how else the developer can twist the cleaning gameplay in future missions. So long as it can wipe its windows down, the road ahead should be clear.
