Ambrosia Sky is a beautiful, intimate cleaning effect combination that is Metroid and PowerWash Simulator
Blog Andrew Joseph 24 Jun , 2025 0
Sometimes a story will find you at the right time, hit you in the right place, speak to a part of you, you are always buried, deep. When we find a connection to a work of art, most of the connection is due to what we find, not just what it is about to say. I stumbled upon the sky of Ambrosia at the right time and it spoke to me. It's harder to have no game at the summer game festival, but I want to think that Ambrosia Sky will resonate with me no matter I find it, which is a testament to how the developer Soft Rain makes this world.
Part of it is conceit, which is different from other things I see in video games. Ambrosia Sky follows Dalia, a deep space disaster expert known as the scarab. Scarab is a mysterious field scientist whose work revolves around the dead. They are not soldiers; scarabs cannot save you. Their job is to sort the space, restore it, and say goodbye to the dead. They are a loose organization of purposeful scientists: they seek death to understand what killed us in order to stop it. They believe that when understanding death between stars, they can find keys to prevent cell death and decay. The Ambrosia project is their attempt to find immortality. Dalia doesn’t believe in the spiritual side of being a scarab (for many, it’s a religion, not just a job), but she is good at it and loves the job.
But at the same time, it's not just a scientific exercise in Dalia. Ambrosia Sky sent her to the agricultural colony cluster on the Saturn ring. Once supreme on the way humans discovered and expanded in the stars, it is now just a relic of an age group, a key but forgotten fixture for an age group. Time has passed. But this is where Dalia grew up and escaped while searching for more. Now, she returns to investigate a crisis that kills almost everyone she knows. It was not a happy destination, which forced her to satisfy her choices and the relationships she left behind, and to create most of the people she knew to survive the guilt.
I know, that's a lot of settings. But that's what you have to know to get to the beginning of my presentation. I played two levels of Ambrosia Sky (one in SGF and one at home; now accessible in Steam Demo), but I want to focus on what I played on SGF. My goal is simple: find out what happened to Gerald Parker, if he dies, take out his DNA sample, send it back to the Ambrosia Project, and then give it a “biotherapy” inside the body. See, Sacarbs can only perform death rituals on people who agree to include their DNA in the project; even then, it is tricky to obtain viable samples. Only if the person in question dies for less than 48 hours, you will only get one.
I entered the area with a chemical sprayer and upgraded several times through Fungus Dalia. An essential to get my chemical sprayer into the flamethrower – perfect for cleaning up nasty pollution. The other is essentially electrical conduits that allow me to power the door by connecting them to other things that use electricity. convenient.
From the moment I entered, the environment felt hostile. I found the body killed by fungal weeds, a disease called Clusterlung. Pollution is everywhere. The fully charged charging roots cover the walls, spreading like the limbs of an overgrown tree, shorting any electronic device they touch. The thick, thick roots of the Explosion Fungi, it does do what its name suggests and will not hurt me unless I trigger it, but it does hinder my path. I have to be careful. Unselected sprays risk a lot of things explode. If I accidentally walk where I go, I will suffer for my troubles. I even saw a small form of alien life (Dalia's muse who told her that all aliens were wiped out before she was born) that could be transformed into a small turret that shot me. I have to be vigilant.
But there are other reasons to be careful. Dalia is a scientist first and like any good scientist, she needs to take samples of the fungus here to understand what it is. This means harvesting carefully. This means safely disengaging fungal fruits (think mushroom fruits with roots) from the stems, which means precision. I don't want to use a sprayer on the fruit itself. I want to cut it off the stem and collect it. The samples I got were used to upgrade the sprayer.
As I cleaned and collected samples, I learned more about the cluster and the people living there. I read news about Maeve, Dalia's former best friend, and Gerald's notes. He sounds rude, perhaps condescending. But Dalia knew him. She was one of the only people he seemed to like. One terminal collects an ominous warning from an anonymous sender, which warns the stepmother Hale, who is headed in the cluster. “It sleeps but has no dreams,” they wrote. “If it dreams, its dreams will end at all times.” What is this? Fungus? Is it true? Neither Dalia nor I know, but we move forward. We are very patient. Let's be careful.
I encountered an unbuilt door. Remember my sprayer – power piece, I cleaned up the electrical contamination and connected from the monitor to the door, opening a room with gravity control in the area. I close them. This opens up the direction of the way forward. In zero gravity, time seems to slow down. I can move more freely, into places where fungi are blocked, into positions, and it is easier to cut explosive fruit off the stem without burning everything. It also allows me to make the most of Daya’s tether, which can draw me from the air to a place or grab fruit from the air. This is a beautiful tool, gravity is turned off, but is it turned on? I'm Zoomin'.
The further I get, the more terrifying the message on the terminal becomes. Gerald sent a message to his friend Lorrie telling her to stop whispering at night. Lorrie told him that it wasn't her, that was the food they grew. “It knows we eat it,” she said. As the situation worsened and the pollutants spread, I learned that Lori asked Gerald to leave with her. He refused and stayed to breed the crops alone.
Finally, I found his unit. The door is open. This is a small apartment with two floors. As I explore it, I see the remnants of life. There are very few decorations placed carefully, which can tell me in a sparsely arranged space. I found Gerald's personal dock. Dalia has a message from 15-year-old Dalia explaining why she had to leave, thanking him for letting her hide in the fields. Dalia could hardly believe that he saved it. But you never know what you say or do will resonate with others.
Finally, I met Gerald. His body was swooped by a chair that was overwhelmed by fungi. The weight of what I did came back to me. I was looking for a body, someone she knew. There is a kind of sadness in the words that have troubled me when she greets him, acceptance. She read his final will, and his consent was part of the Ambrosia project. He told us that he was because he had to do it and that he didn't care what would happen to his body because he would die. “Make the moonlight or save humanity. This is yours.” We see what happened to him, a series of beautifully illustrated panels that look like they were taken from a comic book. Dalia then performs a ritual of death, an act of organic cremation that disperses from the panels and body until everything is covered and then falls off. After a long winter, it looks like a delay in the buds and leaves of trees. It's beautiful, in a sense. Rebirth. Dalia tells Gerald that she can do the last thing for him. Then she collected his DNA and I had to leave.
I can tell you about how fungi sprout randomly and hinder my progress, and I saw another little alien. But, I want to think, my mind and Dalia are still in that room with Gerald. I know the way back, but this is not where I am.
When I play Ambrosia Sky, the words “thoughtful” and “intimacy” often come to mind. Yes, it's a game about the agricultural colonial crisis, yes, but the bet is personal, and every part of its design is based on Dalia, the work she does, and her personal history. During and after the demo, the more I talked to Soft Rain Studio head Joel Burgess and Art Director Adam Volker, the more I realized that all of this was intentional and how much work was created. The title is Ambrosia Sky, evoking ancient myths. Ambrosia, the food of the gods. In this case, the mushrooms will allow us to maintain life outside the earth. Even the title tells part of the story.
Burgess told me that he hopes players don't notice all the work done by putting all the work together, at least at first. “You want this work to feel invisible. But I want us to create a world and a game where people want to spend time, live in their brains, far beyond the time it lives on the screen, reaching their depth, and then the extra effort they put in, we appreciate the extra effort we put in to ensure that the system interacts with each other, and his motivation in the world, and his motivation in the world, and the motivation in the world, and the things that are everywhere, and the things that are everywhere, and the things that are already there, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks, and there are frameworks,
Based on my time at Ambrosia Sky, I think they may have succeeded. I played a lot of games during the summer competition festival. But few of them stuck with me like Ambrosia Sky, and in such a short time, no one could hit me like me. I'm glad to see the soft rain we can still provide us on the cluster, but one thing is clear: their ambitions are great. Like humans in the Ambrosian sky, they can come to the sky towards lofty ideals. I can't wait to see what else they have to show us.