Of the many indie games that were released last year, Ambrosia Sky: Act One was one of the most refreshingly unique.
After standout reveal at last year’s Summer Game Fest (SGF), the debut title from Toronto-based independent studio Soft Rains was released in November to a strong positive reception thanks to its clever mix of PowerWash Simulator-inspired fungus spraying mechanics, rich Metroid Prime-esque sci-fi atmosphere and emotional story about Dalia, a woman tasked with exploring the remnants of an asteroid colony.
Now, the second instalment in the two-part saga is set to launch on August 6, as revealed in publisher Fellow Traveller’s 2026 SGF The Story-Rich Showcase. The final act follows Dalia as she closes in on the truth behind the disaster that devastated her home while searching for her missing ex-girlfriend Maeve.
It’s a big milestone for Soft Rains, as the studio was founded in late 2022 with veteran game developers who’d worked on the likes of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4, Ubisoft Toronto’s Watch Dogs: Legion and Toronto-based Capybara Games’ Grindstone, among other titles. As Soft Rains fast approaches the release of Act Two, the developers find themselves deeply grateful for the whole experience so far.
“This is like a once in a lifetime, once in a career chance for us to express a very particular thing in a very particular way. And Ambrosia Sky wasn’t the product of an individual singular vision, which is a story people like to hear and tell about how games and art are made. But Ambrosia Sky is maybe the most honestly collaborative creative project that I’ve ever been a part of,” says co-founder, studio head and creative director Joel Burgess, who had previously worked at big studios like Bethesda and Ubisoft.
“And so, seeing the support, seeing the validation from our community here among Canadian game developers and from players across the world — it has meant a lot. And I think it’s given us a courage and a confidence in what we’re doing now that I think players will see and hopefully resonate with in Act Two.”
“It’s really lovely. For me, making games and creating art, it’s all about that connection — saying something to other people that resonates with other people, and it’s been really validating to see people get it,” says Kait Tremblay, Soft Rains co-founder and narrative director of Ambrosia Sky who has previously written for the likes of Watch Dogs: Legion and A Mortician’s Tale. “The people who get it, get it, and they really engage with it. And they really know what we’re trying to achieve, see it and respond to it. And that’s the whole point of it for me.”
In particular, Soft Rains has been pleased to see the response to central focus on a queer romance, which has resonated greatly with players. The team has since been leaning into that in its promotion of the game.
Happy Pride Month! 🏳🌈 In honour of the occasion, here is an updated feature list for Ambrosia Sky:
⏰ It’s like 6-ish hours long right now
💕 Queer romance (+ you & your ex are kind of toxic)
🪐 Weird sci-fi vibes you can stare at
🧩 Puzzles you can solve even if you’re burnt outambrosiasky.com
— Ambrosia Sky 🪐 (@softrains.bsky.social) June 1, 2026 at 9:38 PM
The game has also garnered praise for its “death positive” design philosophy. In Ambrosia Sky, Dalia carries out “Death Rite” ceremonies to pay tribute to the victims of the hostile alien fungi, and there’s an evocative “celebration of life” beauty in how they unfold. While Tremblay doesn’t want to reveal much about how Act Two is building on the Death Rites, they do tease some of the ideas Soft Rains wants to explore with them.
“I will say emotionally, we are always really interested in this [being] Dalia’s job, and most of the characters you meet as her are the people she doesn’t know or people she has a lot of affection for. What would it be like to, say, do a death ritual for somebody you don’t like, or you have more intense emotions with?'” they say. “There’s just a lot of that emotional landscape about Dalia’s relationship to the dead that was still a fertile area for us to explore […] Act Two digs into really deeply vulnerable place for me as a writer, and I’m really excited and nervous to share that with the world.”
At the XP Game Summit in Toronto last month, Tremblay and Soft Rains head of operations Trang Nguyen hosted a panel about self-publishing Ambrosia Sky amid a particularly difficult game development climate. Notably, one of the topics that Tremblay touched on was the fact that they were also heavily involved with the game’s marketing, which was a new process for the veteran writer. They note that wearing both marketing and writing hats proved particularly valuable.
“At first, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m a writer — writers tell stories, marketers tell stories. I could just do both those ‘story things.’ But it became so much more for me about actually understanding why people respond to what they respond to,” they explain. “I’ve been developing this ethos of marketing as the emotions. How are you selling the emotions in the story to an audience, and what emotions and stories do those audiences form? And so, once I started thinking about that, it really clicked into place that they actually really feed each other.”
That insight, along with the two-act structure, helped the team know it was on the right track going into the finale.
“People zeroed in so quickly on the relationships that I wanted them to. They immediately picked up on Dalia’s relationship with Maeve and I was like, ‘Perfect!'” says Tremblay. “‘So you’re getting what I want, people are meeting me where I’m asking them to meet me. Cool, I can just execute it. How I can execute on that vision?’ So it was super validating for me. ‘Okay, stay the course, people are getting how I’m doing it — let me just deliver on that.'”
Speaking to the larger creative and business side, Burgess adds that adopting this staggered release helped Soft Rains focus on what’s best for the game.
“I’ve been involved in projects big and small, where you’re thinking about these kinds of [“early access”] things, and it starts to shift away from community feedback and sentiment driving the decisions to the cadence driving the decisions,” he says. “And for this kind of game, and the way that we’ve made it, the act structure put more of a clear [promise that] this isn’t early access to live; there’s not an expectation that we’re going to be doing all these different updates. This is really about how we move forward in the resolve of the story.”
Something that also changed since last year was a shift to a two-act structure after the game was originally announced to be told across a trilogy of chapters. Burgess notes that while discussions about the structural change were underway before the launch of Act One, it was the reception to that first part that ultimately sealed the deal.
“Because of the fact that we released Act One and had something to react to from people’s response, we went, ‘Actually, it will be a stronger, fuller expression of the story to just embrace the two-act structure,’” he says.
“I think we’ll achieve this vision of the story stronger in two acts. I can maintain the momentum that we already got and that we’re already holding with Act One, and land it in a way that I think will be extremely satisfying and do the story honour and justice,” adds Tremblay. “It just became really exciting to me to tighten it up — not change or anything that I wanted to do, but really laser focus on everything.”
Burgess, who also works on level design, says this has shift also helped inform an “all killer, no filler” mentality with Act Two. This will include the addition of new mission locations, new exo-fungus types to navigate and a reworked progression system featuring additional upgrades.
On top of that, Burgess says the team is now directly responding to players who were calling Ambrosia Sky an “immersive sim,” a genre that emphasizes player choice and experimentation and includes games like Deus Ex and Hitman.
“The day we announced the game, I went from, ‘I don’t say immersive sim when I talk about the game,’ and then, once journalists started playing it and were calling it an ‘immersive sim,’ I was like, okay, we can embrace the term,” says Burgess. “With Act Two, we’ve leaned into it a lot […] [by] making levels that are really trying to tell the story, the spaces in the world, but then also just fully explore what players can do with those systems, and the types of things we can do with multiple [spray] solutions. So it’s just been really fun to just lean in and really try to leave nothing in the kitchen and just get every idea that we can out there where people may just see the possibilities.”
Ambrosia Sky: Act Two launches on Steam on August 6. It will be included as a free update to those who already own Act One on Steam before the price goes up at a later date to include both acts.
Image credit: Soft Rains
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