Dalia is a death cleaner.
Death cleaning, as we know it, is the process of sanitizing and tidying the spaces where people take their final breaths, sometimes long after their bodies have begun to decompose. It’s a job here on Earth in the year 2025, but Dalia’s version of death cleaning takes place on the rings of Saturn in a distant future filled with space travel, interplanetary colonization and devastating disease outbreaks. In this scenario, death cleaning involves spraying chemicals over bulging piles of otherworldly contamination and avoiding their defense mechanisms, which can cause fires, explosions and electrical interference. Dalia learns from the alien material as she cleans, harvesting fruit from fungal mounds to create new options for her sprayer. She also listens to the last words of the dead.
Ambrosia Sky is the first game from independent studio Soft Rains and its story trailer landed on Wednesday. In Ambrosia Sky, Dalia is cleaning the Cluster, an agricultural outpost on Saturn’s rings that collapsed when a mysterious biological force subsumed the colony and its people. It’s also Dalia’s former home.
As a Scarab with The Ambrosia Project, her job is to clear out the alien fungus, research its origins and perform Death Rites on the corpses she encounters. Scarabs operate in the shadowy spaces between science and mysticism, and The Ambrosia Project’s goal is to discover a cure for mortality among the stars. Death Rites involve hearing the deceased person’s Last Will and cremating their body with specialized spores, adding their DNA to The Ambrosia Project for further research. It’s a ritualistic acknowledgement of a person’s life as much as their death, and these small ceremonies are just as critical in Ambrosia Sky as the game’s first-person cleaning mechanics.
“I really let myself and our team explore more mythological or fantastical elements, or even folkloric elements, because I think there’s only so much we can know about outer space,” Soft Rains narrative director Kaitlin Tremblay told Engadget. “[Also] there are things that we know concretely about death, but there’s so much about it we don’t know. I think it’s the same kind of interesting liminal space. What don’t we know, and how do we tell stories and try to comfort ourselves and contend with that? That actually makes my brand of sci-fi and my approach on death really similar.”
Ambrosia Sky is an investigation of the universe and mortality alike, in the form of a first-person, speculative-fiction cleaning sim on Saturn’s rings. It features zero-gravity scenes, crafting, equipment upgrades and classic FPS play, underpinned by a slowly unfurling story of lethal disaster.
Soft Rains has been quietly working on Ambrosia Sky since late 2022 and formally announced the game in March 2025. The studio was founded by Tremblay — who was narrative designer on Watch Dogs Legion and Grindstone, and lead writer of A Mortician’s Tale and Seasonala Cemetery — and other industry veterans from Bethesda, Ubisoft and indie teams.
Ambrosia Sky’s story trailer features a staticky, disembodied voice saying, “Hey, Dalia. It’s me. When I die, I want a Scarab called in. And I want it to be you.” It’s surprisingly heart-wrenching, for a two-minute teaser of a sci-fi clean-em-up.
“It’s just honest, right?” Tremblay said. “We have a lot of emotions about death, and our own death and everything around it. Some of those emotions contain brightness and some of them contain darkness, and both are equally valid. Both can exist at the same time.”
Death is a regular visitor in Tremblay’s writing. In particular, A Mortician’s Tale is an acclaimed presentation of the business of mortality, and Seasonala Cemetery is a meditative experience about spending time in a graveyard. In a devlog entry on June 10, Tremblay compared the mortality angle in Ambrosia Sky to that of A Mortician’s Tale, writing, “With Ambrosia Sky, we wanted to have the opportunity to explore how we feel about our own death, rather than the death of our loved ones.”
I was struck by this distinction when I first read it, and because I’m also consumed by thoughts of my own inescapable expiration, I asked Tremblay for more. They said the following:
“That is particularly the approach I’m taking for the Death Rituals. The Death Rituals are when you find those individuals in the world and you sample their DNA for the project, but you’re also listening to their recorded Last Wills. I really wanted those to be a moment to let the characters talk authentically about what their death actually means to them. Because I feel like in my work and in so many other games, it’s often about how we feel about death, or our grief or our mourning process.
“I think this is probably a symptom of post-pandemic brain and getting older, but I’m thinking a lot more about what does my death actually mean to me, and trying to sit with it in a way that doesn’t keep me up until 4AM. So I think this is really that kind of approach. We all probably think about our own death and people have a lot of feelings on their own potential death, and so I wanted to give voice to that, and have this space to talk through and work through some of those emotions.”
And clean up giant tendrils of neon fungus, of course.
Ambrosia Sky is being developed and published by Soft Rains, and it’s due to come out “soon.” A demo is available now on Steam.
Credit: Source link
