Ambrosia Sky: Act One, by Soft Rains, a Toronto-based studio, is a first-person space-cleaning adventure where you play as Dalia, an intergalactic janitor and a field scientist for the Scarabs. Equipped with a cleaning spray-gun, she is sent to tidy up the wreckage of her former colony somewhere Saturn’s rings, a place now overrun by the Cluster Crisis — alien fungus. On the surface, the game is straightforward: blast the fungus to decontaminate the wreckage and get out; but as Dalia moves through each derelict space, she finds stories left behind by the deceased, people she once knew. She collects documents, memories, and bodies, and echoes of their last words before the crisis claimed them.

The game is melancholic. You are lone person cleaning up the ruins of your former home. Empty hallways, abandoned voice notes, scattered belongings, and letters all tell the same story: Dalia was too late to save anyone. But even in the melancholy of isolation, there is forgiveness to be found in absorbing the tragedy and laying the deceased to rest.

The game is short, easily completed under five hours, and clearly a prelude to more given the Act One subtitle. But even in this short, bittersweet journey, there are accessibility concerns players should be aware of. Thankfully, there’s a free demo on Steam you can try before purchasing!

Visual Accessibility

Ambrosia Sky: Act One has a few accessibility wins and some noticeable concerns. The game opens with a photosensitivity warning, which we’re grateful for! However, a warning alone often feels like a band-aid rather than a solution. If they developers know their game features aggressive flashing lights, it would be easy to include a setting that disables them. And as a heads-up: the flashing lights are intense.

The game features multiple instances flashing lights, color shifts, various strobing effects, like the electrical fungi that send jagged blue sparks across your screen. If you get too close, you will get electrocuted, and the sparks will intensify. These sequences are unavoidable and present at the start of the game with some of the most aggressive flashes appearing in tight corridors where clearing out the fungi is mandatory.

Motion sickness is also a concern. The opening menu of the game features a perpetually rotating wheel, making it difficult to focus on clicking the START or OPTIONS buttons because of how dizzying it is. The motion sickness, while not as aggressive in-game, was still a concern with moving interactable screens, drifting debris, circular electricity VFX, and the general busyness of space. Additionally, while we personally didn’t have an issue with this, we could see how the zero-gravity rooms where Dalia has to grapple from wall-to-wall, may also pose a concern.

We were disappointed by how visually inaccessible the game currently is, but like all things, we remain hopeful. Accessibility challenges are solvable! A short chat with Colin Cummings, Soft Rains’ community and social media manager, confirmed the team is actively working on solutions to reduce motion sickness.

Mobility Accessibility

The colony is abandoned, but hostile fungi remain. The game is forgiving with aim precision (despite having a persistent yellow dot in the center of the screen) and doesn’t require perfect alignment, just roughly the general direction is enough to clear them. There are enemy spores like the green ones that shoot gas clouds at you and require a level of quick-reaction timing to dodge and shoot at to eliminate. These are often harder to see than hit due to the gas clouds that obscure your screen and linger for several seconds, adding to the visual clutter and blind panic to shoot at them.

You can unlock immunity for electric and poisonous clouds in the game, which removes the blind panic and danger, but not the behavior; they still shoot at you. The panic shifts from “I’m dying!” to “oops, I smacked into the wall again trying to see.”

The zero-gravity rooms may pose some mobility challenges, requiring you to aim for surfaces to use your grappling tool to move with. This can be made even more difficult with floating debris hitting you, and can feel overwhelming in some rooms that are more ravaged than others.

Auditory Accessibility

Ambrosia Sky: Act One has subtitles with a background, but they are not easy or comfortable to read. The game relies on high contrast colors, like white text on a pure black box, or two synonymous color combinations on top of each other, making the reading experience straining. We often needed to physically move closer to the screen, or move Dalia closer to objects to make the text legible.

The game features excellent voice acting, but if you’re Deaf or hard-of-hearing, the subtitles are incredibly small and innocuous, often going unnoticed amidst the visual chaos. There is no way to resize, recolor, or replay the subtitles (short of reloading a previous save), which often resulted in missing key narrative moments through Dalia’s monologue.

Cognitive Accessibility

There are some timed missions. The first mission has you retrieve a leviathan sample when, out of nowhere, a large, five-minute timer ambushes you. All previously cleared fungi regrow at high speed, blocking hallways, electrifying surfaces, and creating instant panic. The game expects you to learn, in the moment, that you should only carve out a small path to escape rather than clear everything.

Admittedly, we died trying to escape the first time. We were overwhelmed by the insanity of the flashing Low Health warning, regrowing fungus, and visual chaos. Thankfully, the Gameplay Menu has an option to disable the timer, which we immediately used after staring at the Game Over screen in disbelief. We highly recommend disabling the timer before playing.

We would love if a pop-menu appeared after a mission failure to ask the player to disable the timer. It would go a long way in mitigating the frustration, considering it’s easy to give up without realizing the feature exists in the Gameplay Menu as there’s nothing that hints at it.

Mental Health

Ambrosia Sky: Act One is ultimately a story about saying goodbye. Dalia left once upon a time, and returned to devastation. While there’s no blood or gore present in this game, Dalia, as the sole, unintentional survivor, carries the weight of being the last one live, and the consequences of leaving home behind. The emotional themes are heavy: isolation, abandonment, and death, told through fragments and artifacts left behind.

Cleaning Up Accessibility

What could’ve been a meditative sci-fi game about cleaning up the Cluster Crisis and uncovering stories from Dalia’s former home is held back by significant accessibility issues. Many of these serious enough to cause players to put down the game entirely. We’re grateful that Soft Rains is committed to improving the game with future updates, like Act Two and Three, planned for a 2026 release. But for now, we can’t recommend the game in it’s current state.

That said, the art style and emotional heart of the story is absolutely worth returning to when the game receives further updates.

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