According to the religion of Pop Punk, every kid dreams of leaving home, getting out of this shitty town, escaping the ennui and bad times and making their own path. Young and full of fire, you never intend to return home; sometimes you do anyway. For me I was always submerged in the bad times of home; leaving has only happened more recently. But I thought it was necessary. I made up a lot of different excuses and justifications for why I Needed to be in the center of hell. And for a decade I was content to sit there stewing, not realizing the damage I was doing to myself. Today I have nightmares and auditory hallucinations of that place and that time in my life.
Dalia Volkova is a Scarab, a mix between an undertaker, a scavenger and a research scientist whose job it is to scour the sites of immense catastrophe among the various colonies and outposts of a spacefaring humanity, performing last rites and searching for components of the so-called “Ambrosia Project.” As we open on Ambrosia Sky, Dalia has been assigned to the Cluster, an agricultural outpost nestled in between Saturn’s rings. The Cluster has suffered a major accident involving the proliferation of various types of fungus, and those who weren’t able to evacuate perished under the onslaught of the fungus’s massive fruiting bodies, and of a fungal pneumonia called “Clusterlung.” The station must be cleansed, and the people who signed up to be part of the Ambrosia Project must be bioremediated. Dalia was requested to be here specifically.
Because the Cluster is the home Dalia ran away from.
About halfway through my playthrough of Ambrosia Sky I took to Bluesky and described it as “the game you want if you were looking for a Marathon PVE mode.” While the tone of my post was a little snarky I do stand by it: Ambrosia Sky places you in a hostile, claustrophobic world reminiscent of the byzantine mazes of System Shock and Marathon (1994), hands you the pressure washer from Power Wash Simulator and wishes you luck. It scratches a very particular genre and mechanical itch that I think a lot of folks will find satisfying if they bounced off the hardcore PVP extraction loop of Marathon (2026).
Part of what works so well here is that the areas Dalia is thrust into are not small, and cleaning the fungus is no easy task. Power Wash Sim veterans may remember zoning out while using the widest nozzle possible that had the most pressure in it, sweeping dirt and grime away from the various cars, driveways, skate parks and mysterious artifacts with ease and efficiency. In Ambrosia Sky, you have a similar system, but you can’t afford to zone out. Each type of mold you encounter in the station bears a kind of fruit that will protect itself if you get too close: exploding fungus explodes, shock fungus shocks you, and corrupting fungus slowly saps your life force as it hinders your movements. To counteract this, you’ll get different types of sprays, but what worked to clear a room easily early on may not work quite as well as the game progresses.
Luckily the game is flexible enough to let you experiment with your tools, which include (aside from your sprayer) a grappling hook and a flashlight. I’ve seen Ambrosia Sky described in some places (including its Steam storefront page) as an immersive sim, and while I expect some genre purists to scoff at the descriptor as it’s implemented here I think the game gives you just enough freedom (of movement, of approach to problems) to qualify. True freedom comes in the upgrades you can apply to your kit, including a portable “wyrdlight” which gets rid of corrupting fungus temporarily and a “gentle” grappling hook, which allows you to pick fruiting bodies off fungi without damaging them (an important thing for those very same upgrade trees). I wasn’t fully maxed out by the time I reached the end of the game but you could do some cool stuff to your tools and your suit, like increase invulnerability to toxic spores or shocks, or install an emergency defibrillator to revive you if you take lethal damage.
All of this stuff is really, really cool, and I couldn’t get enough of the game’s aesthetic, which in addition to feeling like a 90s Mac FPS also has a sort of William Joyce/Chris Van Allsburg sheen over everything, an intangible yet very warm and comforting retrofuturism that really just stoked me out after years of getting bored with the same angular metal hallways and too-sleek sans-serif design choices of modern futurist aesthetics.
But.
The story of Ambrosia Sky is not a complicated one. Dalia Volkova left the Saturn Cluster station as a teenager because her stepmother Hale, the head of operations on the station, was a malignant narcissist. The incident(s) which led to Dalia sneaking away with a Scarab is not detailed, but isn’t hard to imagine: Hale crushed Dalia under the weight of impossible expectations while simultaneously trying to mold her (no pun intended) into someone who could take over the family business of station administration when she’s done holding power. Dalia wanted freedom, specifically the freedom to shape her own life, away from her stepmother. And so she left; in so doing, she hurt her girlfriend Maeve, who thought she was abandoning her, leaving her to stagnate here among Saturn’s rings.
This did not stop Hale from being a malignant narcissist. And when the crisis began to manifest, some 15 or so years later, it is her mismanagement that causes everything to fall apart, and for so many people to die who probably didn’t need to. Is there also an inexorably-growing colony of space fungus taking over everything? Yeah. Are there also strange conspiracies and secret cultic organizations moving through the shadows, their plans only discernible after so many email terminals have been read? Absolutely. But as one such email says: none of all that would’ve happened if not for Hale’s behavior, her mistreatment of everyone around her, her creation of an us-against-them fantasy to write off anyone who might have criticisms of her actions.
I think anyone who has lived under a roof with a malignant narcissist will find something resonant here in Ambrosia Sky, and it certainly struck a chord with me. What I found as I reflected on the events of the second act that close out the game was that it all sort of made things feel strangely smaller for me. There’s no mystery here; the malignant narcissist in power made shit worse and (too many) people died. It’s like the worst nightmare of my own life has come true and I’m too late to actually stop it from happening, but there’s so much distance here that it kind of just hits flat. “Shittiest person you know hurt more folks; more at 11.” I’m not mad about this smallness, or disappointed; instead I just feel… melancholic.
It is there that truths might be told
The giddy rot of mycelium
That time has favoured nought
The sum of our endeavour
Cast like chaff in springs first sigh
And now we are all but spent
The residue of eaten food
The gristle caught in buckled tooth
That is tongued incessantly—MORROW, “Rejoice This Quiet Earth“
I am really happy I picked up Ambrosia Sky. I went in with next to no expectations and found something really incredible that affected me in ways I didn’t anticipate. It reminded me of so many different artistic and narrative touchstones that I’d be here forever just listing them all, if I had a mind to do so, but it held onto its core mechanical and narrative identity and gave me something to think about for long after I return to my shuttle. Really truly some time for this one.
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