Though there are multiple endings in Solar Ash, much of the game follows a single critical path. You’ll enter an area, clear out anomalies, then kill the boss. This process repeats six times total. Each area introduces new mechanics and ups the technical requirements with hazards, more precise platforming, and more complicated puzzles.
Once you’ve completed all six areas, you unlock the endgame and two possible endings. There are no secret or “true” endings here. This guide will cover both the “good” and “bad” endings to Solar Ash.
Editor’s note: There are major story spoilers ahead.
How to Get the Good and Bad Endings in Solar Ash
Defeating the boss of each area sends you to meet Echo, where you can activate one of the endings. Echo is essentially the main character Rei’s soul ripped from her body and forced to relive immeasurable emotional and spiritual torment. Once, the two were the same, and that combined entity tried and failed to save her home planet using the Starseed, only to be ripped apart at the metaphysical level.
Rei, the player character, is nothing more than a body lacking any memory of her initial failure, doomed to perpetuate the cycle of Echo’s agony. Each time Rei reaches the Starseed and activates it, the device once again rips her apart, but with her soul already separated, all that remains is just that: a Remnant.
Yep, the bosses you’ve been fighting are previous iterations of Rei twisted and corrupted by the Starseed.
When you arrive at the Starseed in the game’s current cycle, your only choice initially is to activate the device, unaware as both Rei and the player are of its true nature. Echo will stop you and try to explain the situation one last time. At this point, you’re presented with a choice.
Solar Ash “Bad” Ending: Continuing the Cycle
If you choose “Activate the Starseed,” you get the Solar Ash “bad” ending. Echo fades away, and the Rei you’ve been playing as the whole game becomes yet another Remnant. A new Rei enters existence at the start of the game, with her armor broken, her memories gone, and the promise of the whole charade repeating endlessly.
You briefly control the new Rei to reach the Crater, at which point the game ends and the credits roll, putting you back at Cyd with the fully charged Starseed.
Solar Ash “Good” Ending: Destroying the Starseed and Reuniting Rei
If you choose instead to “Destroy the Starseed,” you get the Solar Ash “good” ending. Echo is shocked and wonders why this time is different. Rather than being obliterated utterly, the energy feedback distorts Rei into a final Remnant but frees Echo, shunting her out of her metaphysical prison and giving her a spiritual body.
At this point, everything you learned over the course of Solar Ash comes into play, as now you control Echo in one final Remnant fight against yourself for this ending. Getting onto this Remnant is the easy part. Reaching the various beams and girders sticking out of her is not.
This last fight isn’t the hardest, and the only way to fail is to give up. Succeed, and Rei and Echo fuse into their original self, cursed to wander the Ultravoid with the weight of their failure but with a faint hope of starting something new in its depths.
And that’s how to get the “good” and “bad” endings in Solar Ash. Technically, neither ending is inherently good or bad, and there’s no real true ending or secret ending as you may find in games like Persona 5 Royal or Shin Megami Tensei V. It’s just a binary choice, but each is worth experiencing if you’re caught up in the story. For more, consider checking out our other Solar Ash guides.
