Ambrosia Sky is much more than a cleaning game. It is, in a word, heavier. Of course, that comes with the territory when you’re a cleaner in a sci-fi immersive sim about cleaning up sites where people have died, performing their death rites, and fueling a mysterious organization’s tantalizing promises. Like I said, this is more than just another cleaning game.
Ambrosia Sky comes by way of Soft Rains, a new studio that’s amassed talent from all over the games industry to make something that feels quite special. Something that skirts the lines between numerous genres that I happen to admire and also pulls some style from outside of games to deliver a puzzling and meditative experience. But I should back up first.
In Ambrosia Sky, you play as Dalia, a cleaner and scientist for an organization called the Scarabs. The Scarabs employ folks like Dalia who perform death rites for the recently deceased. That is if the person who has passed has consented to also having their body effectively swabbed to be used for the Scarabs’ goal of achieving immortality via the Ambrosia Project. Dalia fled from her home colony at an early age and eventually fell in with the Scarabs, which has successfully kept her from home until she’s eventually sent back to investigate the curious fungal growth that seems to have wiped her birthplace, and most everyone in it, out.
The demo we played at Summer Game Fest, which is also available now on Steam, centers on a mission where Dalia is going to collect the remains of someone she knew as a kid. In order to reach Gerald Parker, the aforementioned figure of her past, Dalia must first rid the space station of the fungus blocking her way. As Dalia, the player is equipped with a blaster capable of hosing the things off, but the player is also welcome to switch between patterns (such as a narrow but forceful stream vs. a horizontal jet) and their choice of ammo, to use a bit of parlance folks will be familiar with. Water is the default choice here, but you are also free to switch between a cleansing fire, or a toggle that shoots a highly conductive putty that can siphon and direct electricity. As is perhaps clear, you won’t just be cleaning up messes in Ambrosia Sky.
For example, electrical plants will sprout from the fungi, disrupting nearby light fixtures and terminals, as well as shocking players who come too close. You could simply blast the things and move on, but there is incentive to remove the fruit at the very heart of these entanglements from the rest and harvest them for resources, which tie into a crafting and upgrade system that plays out between missions. Therefore, it becomes pivotal to exercise caution and precision with growths like these (as well as other explosive ones) in order to better your tools.
Other scenarios, though, encourage rooting around the stations. These tiny immersive sim levels can yield results that alter the flow of a mission. A door seemed to lack power, but after using the electric toggle on my nozzle to redirect power from a nearby light to it, I was able to find the gravity controls for the station and shut them off. This came in handy once I reached the next room in the mission, where I could float freely above the exploding and electrical fruits, as well as nasty little worms that decided to shoot spores at me, with the help of my tethering grapple shot, which let me most efficiently clear and harvest the room. I never had to find that anti-gravity chamber though, and upon a revisit, I even found a shortcut that took me through some hidden vents from one end of the level to the next. And if these levels begin like this, who’s to say where they end up?
Upon getting to the level’s end, I was greeted by the corpse of Gerald, who I’d learned stubbornly stood behind while everyone else escaped the calamity that claimed his life. And then after swiping what I needed from his body, I was treated to… something else. A series of panels, akin to a comic book page, give me the briefest glimpse at Dalia’s performance of the rites, while an audio log repeats his final words to me. “I am only recording this because Lorrie says so. But I do not care what happens to my body. I will be dead. Make moonshine or save humanity. It is yours now.” A mossy pattern consumes the words and panels onscreen, and when they clear, Gerald’s gone. Just his essence remains. And as if struck by the gravity of seeing and hearing this person from her past for the first time in a long time, only to lay him to rest, Dalia sits and takes a breather before wrapping up her mission.
It’s weird shit, it’s plenty compelling on its face, and I love it. Ambrosia Sky is the kind of rich conceit that begs a million questions. How long have the Scarabs been around? How does the rest of this universe see them and their goals? Is that goal real? What could’ve driven Dalia away from her colony and into the arms of a group like that? What is the correlation between the Scarabs and this reactive and deadly fungus that Dalia now has to face-off against? What happened to prompt this crisis? And what exactly is an Ambrosia Sky?
I went digging for answers only to come away from the experience with more questions and a deep desire to get to the bottom of Ambrosia Sky. If that’s not the sign of a promising and exciting new game, then I don’t know what is. I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to Saturn’s Cluster, and get to the heart of these mysteries, but I do know it can’t come soon enough.
Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.
