Ambrosia Sky

Do YOU love Powerwash Simulator but wish that instead of cleaning things, you were aggressing against a bunch of vaguely-textured blobs while mediocre narration plays?! Then Ambrosia Sky is for you! Perhaps a bit uncharitable but that was my initial impression and frankly I do not care enough to play more of the game to be disabused of that, because I do not think I will. I think it would have worked better if the voice acting had any kind of nuance and the game didn't immediately overplay its emotional hand. It starts off with the maudlin music and "whoooooah, remember the beautiful life of this guy you never knew existed until two minutes ago... whooooah" and dramatic scenes celebrating his... mediocre existence as a grumpy old man in space, within like 30 minutes of booting up the game. You need to earn some investment before going all in on that sort of thing. Like... it's just played so heavyhandedly that it comes across as lazy and eyerolly, rather than sincere. Like if we'd had... I don't know, at least an hour with a competent voice actor to get sold that, "oh, hey, Main Character Person cares about this dude and it's a poignant moment for her when she finds out…

Had a good time with this game, enough it became my fixation for a couple of weeks (when I had the time). It's sedate and melancholy, more about experiencing the world while the character Dalia comes to grips with her emotionally fraught homecoming being reduced to picking up the pieces after an all-consuming disaster. All-consuming for a backwater the rest of the galaxy no longer cares about, anyway. The plot touches lightly on cosmic horror and transhumanism, but is entirely about the personal meaning of what's happening for Dalia and those she left behind. The gameplay is straightforward, with a spray-gun of anti-fungal agent (soon upgraded with a couple other chemical sprays) and a lot of weird space fungi to clean up. Most levels have a way to turn off the gravity so you can float and grapple around to poke at all the nooks and crannies, and I love a chance to go flying. You can stick to the mission objectives and move on or go all out in scrubbing the place clean and searching for the small handful of collectibles for the fun of it. You'll want to be thorough if you want to fill out the upgrade tree, but most of the upgrades are conveniences you can do without. (But they ARE…

The points i liked about this game: the general setting of the game, the levels design and lore of the games universe. What i didn´t like: the gameplay is beyond boring, the story flimsy and the protagonist so incomprehensibly dramatic and whiny it will curl your toenails. The game fails to make you feel any connection to the people in the story via "show. don´t tell" exploration, so the protag has to narrate all of her (mostly maudlin) feelings the whole time. Add on top that the game got released with only 1/3 of its content finished (10/2025), got part 2 of 3 updated a year later (08/2026) and the part 3 of the planned trilogy scrapped / condensed into part 2. It feels like the Devs had a strong vision for the game, lost the plot in development, released a halfbaked game just to secure fundings and completed it haphazardly a year later just to have it done and over.

Ambrosia Sky succeeds much more as a game than as a narrative. The mechanics are interesting, with upgrades that are generally meaningful, and puzzles that amused without really stressing me out. For a sort of somber, cozy game with cleaning mechanics, it achieves what it sets out to do. The narrative seems stressed by cost on some levels. The fact that Dalia spends 99% of the game talking to herself feels less dramatically necessary than financially required. There's several relationships, like with her handler, her step-mom, and her ex-girlfriend where some back and forth would have enriched it a lot. As it stands, it's just a young woman complaining about her problems. With the step mother especially this leads to levels that feel like listening to someone vent on a boring social media post. I don't think this game quite reaches the emotional heights of something like Spiritfarer, but it was an interesting experience with some compelling gameplay, and makes me curious what this studio might do next.

It's a narrative driven, melancholic elaboration on some elements from System Shock that made you feel like a science janitor. Every level has a few scattered masses of fungal growth that throw you a series of environmental hazards that mildly complicate the cleaning, harvesting fruit and data collection whilst exploring parts of a compromised colony site. It comes with a gorgeous art style and soundtrack, which admittedly is what drew me in initially, as well as the speculative fiction setting which did impress. I was really looking forward to cleaning the rest of this up around its act two release. I wasn't all that disappointed about the rescoped back half but it's shorter and so briefly rounds out the last people you aimed to see at the site- in a way that's more reflective of its themes of death, and the nature of unfulfilled promises. If I had to complain about anything, it would be that the collectables don't really do anything, which is just a bit of a bummer! Plus, it feels cut short- despite how I said it still narratively works. I don't feel like the game ever that gave me too much of the sense of mechanical eureka that I like from the Im-sim 'genre'. Looking forwar…

What an emotional journey! In terms of story, this game is an speculative science fiction masterpiece. You start in media res, not knowing much, but by the end you are invested in the world and the fate of all those who inhabit it. The graphics and art style is beautiful, seeing outer space in such bright colors is a delight. The gameplay has the exploration elements of an immersive sim, with the satisfactory relaxation of something like Powerwash Simulator. Seeing how you clean each level of infection is a highlight of the game. It is a deep meditative game that I will be thinking about for a long time. I hope there is a follow up and I hope the studio is very successful, since it is well deserved.