Ambrosia Sky is a narrative power-washing game with the heart of an immersive sim—try the Steam de

After years of operating in "stealth mode," Soft Rains, an indie outfit founded by ex-, Valve, Riot, and Bethesda devs, is ready to talk about its first game. Ambrosia Sky, revealed today during the , is a narrative cleaning game channelling equal parts System Shock and PowerWash Simulator.

That's quite the potent combo in what I'd describe as a golden age for job sim games. In the vein of a Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Ambrosia Sky wants its narrative to stand hand-in-hand with its zen taskwork. You play as Dalia, a member of the Scarabs investigating a disaster that struck an agricultural fungus farm in an asteroid cluster of Saturn. That cluster is where Dalia grew up, so it's a bittersweet homecoming.

In a hands-off demo shared over Discord, [[link]] Soft Rains' co-founder Joel Burgess and narrative director Kait Tremblay showed me the ropes. The moment-to-moment of its opening minutes channelled System Shock—slowly creeping down narrow hallways of abandoned space stations flanked by environmental dangers—but Ambrosia Sky asks you to imagine a world where all your problems can be solved with a bit of cleaning.

Our first hazard was an intimidating pile of fungus, pungent, ribbed, and expanding into every unclaimed crevice of the room. A quick blast of Dalia's sprayer cut through the insidious mycoprotein like butter, carving a path through the room. On the other side was a text log from a farmer left before the fungal disaster that wiped everyone out.

Yep, Ambrosia Sky is a "piece it together one log at a time" sorta game. I'm totally into it, partly because I eat pieced-together tragedies from the cryptic remnants of its victims for breakfast, but also because [[link]] the pleasant flow of Dalia's cleansing sprayer tickles the right corners of my brain.

"I think [Ambrosia Sky] tucks nicely in that legacy of games like Hardspace and PowerWash," Burgess told PC Gamer. "Even as we've been making this game, we've seen more exploration and interest in the job game space. We think this brings something unique, not just in our worldbuilding and story, but also being able to bring elements of classic immersive sim games and job sim games, but combine them in ways that we haven't seen before."

The pair demonstrated with an early environmental puzzle that leverages a dynamic power system. An electro-charged species of fungi can spread to the station's electrical systems, shorting out automatic [[link]] doors and disabling lights until it's cleaned. A later upgrade even allows you to bypass puzzles with a special conductive spray that can carry power from one place to another.

The whole fungal system is neat tech. Watching it organically grow into a hallway and dynamically dissolve is satisfying, and pulling it off took some new tech.

"The way we grow the fungus is very procedural. Every species has its own growth rules for the way it behaves and propagates," Burgess said. To grow the fungus and allow it to freely deform, the studio developed a technology it calls "quantized impact fields."

"It wouldn't be quite right to call it voxels, but it's not quite wrong either," he added.

The stakes of these early encounters seemed low. Dalia was rarely in danger unless she stood too close to an explosive fungus seed or lingered in the shocking wake of the blue one. Instead, Burgess says that danger in Ambrosia Sky comes from the complacency of entering a zen-like state while meticulously cleaning a room, only to forget about the fungal proximity mines, start a fire you can't escape, or clog your spray when you need it most.

No word on a release date yet, but I'm definitely headed to the Ambrosia Sky booth at Summer Game Fest to see if my 20 hours of PowerWash Sim skills will give me an edge.

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