dpWhen last I left off with Ambrosia Sky, I wasn’t particularly sold on the game. My initial hopes that it would be a moody, Powerwash Simulator in space, wrapped around a compelling narrative, were somewhat dashed, and the game I was left with wasn’t really doing enough with its gameplay or storytelling to hook me in. When I heard the game would nix its three-part structure for two, I hoped maybe it would focus on its strongest points and deliver a compelling finale.
And unfortunately, that isn’t the case. I’ve often said in my reviews that reviewing a mediocre game is worse than reviewing one that is either bad or good, because there’s so little to actually say about a game that neither fails, nor really succeeds in its endeavours. Ambrosia Sky: Act Two is just more of the same—all the things I complained about last November, with some more added annoyances.
Ambrosia Sky: Act Two continues Dalia’s quest to put an end to the troublesome fungus that has taken over The Cluster. While the scope of the plot remains as large as the first—emphasizing the potential danger of The Crisis and Dalia’s desperate struggle to find a cure—Act Two tries to scale things back as a mysterious message from her ex-girlfriend Maeve pushes Dalia on to try and find her and what her research may have found.
“Ambrosia Sky: Act Two is just more of the same—all the things I complained about last November, with some more added annoyances.”
It does feel like a bit more of a personal journey in the second act. Why Dalia still feels the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders, she’s more focused on finding Maeve and musing on their past, and who she was while they were together. It adds a more personal dimension to the mystery. While Dalia still needs to remark on every little thing and refuses to let the atmosphere and setting do the narrative’s heavy-lifting, it does at least feel more thematically accurate that she would be openly reminiscing about her old girlfriend.
The gameplay is also more of the same. It consists of the same handful of missions players encountered in Act One, only now set in slightly different areas. Players either collect a set number of seeds or search for a specific key item, occasionally stopping to spray patches of fungus that block the way forward. It remains a collection of linear hallways, usually with only one clear route, despite presenting itself as an “immersive sim.”
The core gameplay also fails to introduce enough new ideas to make Ambrosia Sky: Act Two more exciting. A new type of Corruptor fungus slows players who touch it and makes other fungal growth resistant to normal sprays, requiring a special Wyrdlight to cleanse it. However, as in the previous act, the game is so straightforward that the puzzle-solving required to activate these lights never makes the threat feel particularly dangerous.
And while Ambrosia Sky: Act Two does try to introduce some interesting locations to the mix, so many of them are still just linear corridors in empty space stations that they all just kind of blur together.
Because there are no genuine threats in Ambrosia Sky, spraying away fungus eventually becomes frustratingly dull. It mainly serves to hinder your progress through an otherwise linear, narrative-driven game. There is little strategy or tension beyond the manufactured danger of standing in the wrong place. There is not even a strong puzzle-solving reason to clear the fungus, leaving you to wonder: what is the point?
The obvious answer is that it exists to support the gameplay. However, unlike PowerWash Simulator, which Ambrosia Sky clearly draws from, there is no sense of satisfaction in being presented with a large mess or difficult task and slowly working to clean it up. Here, the fungus serves as an irritating obstacle that becomes no more interesting when a time limit is added, and it keeps reappearing in areas you have already cleared.
And while Ambrosia Sky: Act Two does try to introduce some interesting locations to the mix, so many of them are still just linear corridors in empty space stations that they all just kind of blur together. When things do get somewhat esoteric or visually interesting, it kind of just slips right past you because no one level stands out from the other. It does go for bigger and bolder visual concepts, but every time I saw one, it elicited little more than a, “Huh…neat…” from me.
I guess I didn’t know what I was expecting with Ambrosia Sky: Act Two. I was hoping that it would’ve offered something more engaging, considering this was meant to end the game where its third act no longer could. I was hoping it could end on a bang, but instead it was just the same beleaguered sigh I had when I played Act One.
