It’s hard to describe a game by a team that’s setting out to do something different, but I’m going to do my best after playing a bit of the impressive Ambrosia Sky out of the 2025 Summer Game Fest.
The upcoming sci-fi game from Soft Rains, a new studio made up for veteran devs who worked on Skyrim, Fallout 4, A Mortician’s Tale, and Valorant, has a female lead in a spacesuit returning to the planet she grew up on, now overrun by hostile alien life (yes, like Samus returning to Zebes). But as seen in the first trailer for the game, which debuted at the PC Gaming Show on Sunday afternoon, her blaster is not so much a weapon as a water gun, and Ambrosia Sky is not so much about combat as power-washing cleanup; this alien life, which is actually a mysterious fungal overgrowth, is weak to water.
If that sounds cozy, note that Ambrosia Sky is also about performing funeral rites for the bodies of the people that our heroine once knew, and uncovering what their lives were like before through environmental storytelling. Even though I only got to play for a short time while on the ground at Summer Game Fest, I am very much on board for what looks like it might be a pretty heartbreaking mission.
“With this one… a lot of the setting led it,” Soft Rains studio director Joel Burgess explained to me after I finished the demo. “It is not the kind of game that began with one person. Even at the earliest stage, there were a handful of us [at Soft Rains], so it’s like, ‘Hey, what do we love playing? What do we love making? What have we done before? And how do we synthesize those into something that only this team could make?’ And even when it was just the very, very smallest version of that, we knew we’re really just in contemporaneous sci-fi — more contemporaneous than nostalgic. How can we make a science fiction story that speaks to the anxieties of today, and not a love letter to some cyberpunk novel from 30 years ago?”
Burgess is no stranger to making games that are iterations on what came before, having previously worked at Bethesda. The real challenge is making something that feels truly new. In the case of Ambrosia Sky, that meant painting a picture of a sci-fi future that feels grounded in human emotion and connection — while also being a satisfying cleanup game that feels good to play.
Image: Soft Rains
From what I played, the experience of cleanup in Ambrosia Sky feels as satisfying as any good cleaning game should be. Blasting water at a space station overgrown with fungus and watching it melt away feels rewarding. Also, for the purposes of the demo I played, Burgess and his colleagues let me unlock a few abilities that won’t be available in the early game; my water gun gained two new settings, one that could shoot flames and another that shot a material that was conductive to electricity (which was useful for creating chains to power up electric doors that needed to be unlocked). I also got the chance to try out a zero-G setting, allowing me to float around the level and shoot at fungus from all angles; this was very fun, and even as someone who gets easily motion sick in games, I didn’t experience that at all and felt totally in control of Dalia and her movement speed throughout.
But, again, I can tell there’s more to this than unlocking doors with Metroid-style abilities or just cleaning fungus off the walls. Propelled by a gorgeous synth-forward soundtrack, I discovered one of the bodies of Dalia’s former friends; I read through his final missive and performed a haunting funeral rite. Burgess told me the final version of the game will include voice acting as well, but even without it, I felt moved.
The music plays a major part in setting the emotional tone. According to Burgess, the game’s composer, Greg Harrison, thought through the types of instrumentation that this futuristic intergalactic society might be using and incorporated that into his work on the game.
“One thing we hit on really early was no matter what part of the world you’re from, there is a cultural instrument that always occurs, which is the jaw harp,” said Burgess. “I’m American originally. And so for me, I really strongly associate the jaw harp with the South. But a member of our team who’s born in Vietnam is like, ‘No, the jaw harp is a Vietnamese instrument.’ And there’s a different one here, and different one there, but like — every culture, there’s a jaw harp. So one of the big instruments is jaw harps. [Greg Harrison] went and bought jaw harps of different sizes and apertures. All that world-building just goes into every detail.”
Image: Soft Rains
When asked about the game’s inspirations, Burgess cited several literary sources — Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books, but also the work of Andy Weir and Becky Chambers. (The game’s narrative director, Kaitlin Tremblay, is also a novelist.) Yet he cautioned that even these inspirations aren’t quite agreed-upon internally, as the team is really focused on making something wholly new and moving beyond well-worn texts and stories.
“We often outsmart ourselves,” Burgess explained, “because we don’t want — we so strongly don’t want to be like, ‘This is an homage to this thing,’ or ‘It’s a spiritual successor to this thing that we shipped in the past.’ We still want so badly to be original.” Hence the team’s focus on rejecting nostalgia, which Burgess emphasized is “not meant to be derisive. It’s just that, there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of that.”
As for whether Ambrosia Sky will succeed in its quest to be something wholly new, time will tell — and it’s not entirely clear how much time, as Burgess declined to share details about a release window. However long it takes to bake, though, I’ll be keeping an eye out for the project, and trying to describe its big swings.
