A sci-fi cleaning game about death? Here’s to Ambrosia Sky, a game from a team that’s taking a big risk
The last video game I discovered in Los Angeles was my favorite
A few weeks ago, when I was done seeing new video games at the Summer Game Fest showcase in Los Angeles and just schmoozing my way through an event-ending mixer, a trusted peer asked me if I’d played Ambrosia Sky.
Never heard of it, I said.
It’s here, he said. A fellow reporter and critic of good taste had played it, he told me. She’d described it as “Metroid Prime meets PowerWash Simulator.”
My schmoozing was immediately over.
Where, I asked, could I find this game?
The directions were complicated:
I’d have to exit a tent, make a left, then a right, then another right, then a left, then walk a bit, through a door, another right, walk down a hall….when I got that far I wondered if I’d gone the wrong way… nope!... down some steps, another left and there I found it: Ambrosia Sky.
Lucky me, there were still about 30 minutes left of Summer Game Fest, and there were no more appointments for this game booked.
Lucky me, I got to play Ambrosia Sky and speak to the quotable lead developer behind it.
(And, lucky you, the demo I played is now on Steam, though a PR person repping the game told me it’s only there through June 30th. Ambrosia Sky is still early and has no release date, so your window of opportunity is small.)
In LA, at my unscheduled, last-minute, hope-I-don’t-miss-my-flight session, I played this game as a woman named Dalia. She’s a Scarab in the fiction of Ambrosia Sky—meaning she’s a space-faring undertaker—traveling to a colony near Saturn where she’d been raised, then estranged from for the past 15 years.
In first-person, as Dalia, I crept my way through a damaged base, past cracked windows and dented doors and through halls and into rooms coated with blue, purple and orange overgrown fungi. I was armed with a sprayer that could shoot water, fire or electricity-conducing foam, which I could use to hose down the fungi, maybe burn some down or even connect power sources to turn on computers or turn off gravity.
It did indeed feel like PowerWash Simulator, as I satisfyingly sprayed away the massive space fungi.
It did indeed feel like Metroid Prime, as I explored the damaged base, read notes, examined corpses and used a grappling hook to pull Dalia to toward a damaged doorway.
I found a switch to turn off gravity and now I was floating through the levels.
I eventually found my goal, the corpse of an old man, Gerald Parker, who Dalia knew when she was a kid. As calamity struck the colony, he’d stayed behind and died in his chair. Gerald had always been nice to Dalia, she remembered. Before his death, Gerald had given his consent for bioremediation, the game’s more dramatic form of organ donation. Dalia read his last wishes, then conducted a transformation that reduced his body to a plant and some life essence.
“It's a weird game, man,” Ambrosia Sky’s lead developer Joel Burgess told me, as we talked through my session.
Burgess spent 11 years at Bethesda, working on the big Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, was then at Ubisoft for a Watch Dogs and Capybara after that. Founded in 2022, Soft Rains is his tiniest team, a Toronto-based indie group of developers from AAA and indie studios.
Burgess believes that Ambrosia Sky strays from what you’d usually see from a team with pedigree at big studios.
The usual narrative, he said, would be that “some triple A [people] got some funding and they're gonna found a studio to make the game that they've always wanted to make—or the same game they made for the last studio, but better.
“For us, we really wanted to go the other direction.”
He added: “We wanted to come up with something that was really specific to these people: What we wanted to, what they could do.”
In late 2022 the team started working and hatched an idea for a sci-fi game set near Saturn. It would use the mechanics of popular cleaning games and put them in a world that was more of a systems-driven immersive sim (meaning you could tinker with the virtual world around you and see how it reacts). The game would also be about death, but not the way most games are. Its lead writer, Soft Rains narrative director Kait Tremblay, previously penned A Mortician’s Tale, a somber game about running a funeral home. In this game, too, the dead would be treated with care.
“One of the things that we care about a lot with this game is we want to turn on its head the way we treat the casual consequences of gameplay,” Burgess said. “We're really trying to treat every corpse with respect.”
The vibe is melancholy, but Ambrosia Sky’s gameplay is lively and kinetic. Cleaning the fungi feels good but also urgent, as the simulated spores detonate from flame, crackle with electricity and, at times, regrow. Burgess is proud of the game’s complex simulations, and promises it scales well depending on computer power. I can attest that the game ran just fine on my Steam Deck when I re-tried the demo at home, though it was more impressive on a bigger monitor, running off a more powerful PC at Summer Game Fest.
Burgess knows that Ambrosia isn’t an easy sell. Sure, there’s people like me who recognize the influences and are excited for this kind of thing. But it’s not combining the world’s most popular game types, nor is it something that’s going to send publishers rushing to back the project. (It’s a single-player game; it’s not that violent; it’s not a cute cozy game, either).
But he’s cool with Ambrosia Sky being different. In fact, that’s what he hopes will make Soft Rains’ efforts pan out.
“I feel like the short-term, fear-based decision-making would be to go the opposite direction of every decision we've made,” Burgess told me in L.A.
“But, in this climate, there's so many great games—[and] so much difficulty for developers—that I think that the greater existential risk is to be forgettable, to be just another gun aimed at the same target.”
Item 2: In brief
👀 Square Enix did not offer any news this week in response to stockholder requests for a Chrono Trigger remake or specific promises to make more turn-based role-playing games. They were asked about those topics during the company’s annual shareholders meeting this week, based on the newly released Japanese transcript of the event’s Q&A.
The company’s answers were polite but noncommittal, saying it values turn-based battle systems and that it considers remakes a valuable part of its portfolio.
Accounts of the Q&A earlier this week from an attendee produced confusion over the company’s answers. In the transcript, Square said social media reports about the Q&A had led to misunderstandings and that readers should rely on official transcripts.
💰 Riot Games will allow sports-betting companies to sponsor League of Legends and Valorant teams, though will not allow ads for those sponsors to appear during Riot esports broadcasts nor on team jerseys, GameSpot reports.
🎮 Epic Games has won default $176,000 judgment against a player it alleges cheated in a Fortnite tournament, and says it will donate any money it collects from the cheater to charity.
The accused cheater did not reply to the lawsuit, hence the default ruling.
Epic had asserted that the player made nearly $7,000 in competitive play, following the company detecting use of a software cheat.
🏆 The Game of the Year at the 2025 Games For Change festival in NYC this week was Indika, a third person adventure about a nun facing a moral crisis, from Kazakhstan-based studio Odd-Meter.
Other winners included:
Vampire Therapist - for Best in Health and Wellness)
Umfeld - a game about “how communities can build supportive networks to prevent intimate partner violence before it occurs” for Best In Impact
…and In the Current of Being - a haptics experience meant to convey the journey of a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy for Best Innovation.
Item 3: The week ahead
Next week, which ends with a U.S. federal holiday on July 4th, looks to be light on releases and scheduled events. Unfortunately, there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over the Xbox workforce over reportedly looming cuts, as the company concludes its fiscal year on Monday.
Tuesday, July 1
Mecha Break (PC, Xbox) is released.
Thursday, July 3
Super Mario Strikers (GameCube, via the Switch 2’s Nintendo Switch Online) is re-released, 20 years since its debut.
I met the team and played the demo of Ambrosia Sky in Toronto at XP Game Summit, and I'm excited to support the game for exactly the reasons you mentioned—it's weird and goes in the opposite direction of expectations. I think it may do well because of that.