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Overview
Nullstar: Solus launched April 16, 2026 across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. You play as a corporate scav drone pilot sent to salvage the remains of a nullstar, one of the volatile near-infinite energy sources that mankind discovered in the distant future. These anomalies powered entire planets, but they're also time bombs. The civilization that built the megastructure you're tearing through didn't make it. Now you're picking through the bones.
The setup isn't just window dressing. The world Smash Attack Aus has built carries a quiet sense of dread beneath the arcade action, a dying megastructure that hints at something larger going on beneath its surface. The IGDB description puts it plainly: "all is not as it might seem." That's about as much story as you get upfront, which suits the game's focus on moment-to-moment play rather than cutscenes.
What does the gameplay actually feel like?
Nullstar: Solus is a precision platformer built around flight and thruster mechanics rather than traditional jump-and-run movement. Controlling the Solus means learning how thrust direction, momentum, and timing interact across 80 levels of ruins and hazards. It's not forgiving, and it's not meant to be.
Key mechanics at the core of the experience:
- Thruster-based flight controls
- 80 precision-designed levels
- Ancient guardian boss encounters
- Environmental hazards throughout ruins
- Speedrun-focused time tracking
The game's official site emphasizes "tight gameplay and speed-running" as the primary design pillars, and that comes through in how the levels are structured. Each one is a puzzle of movement, asking you to find the fastest line through obstacles rather than simply survive them.
World and setting: what's left of a dead civilization
The setting does more work than it might seem. You're not just in a generic sci-fi ruin. The megastructure you're navigating once housed an entire civilization, and the pixel art environment communicates that history through its design. Collapsed corridors, ancient guardian enemies, and the eerie silence of a place that used to matter all add up to an atmosphere that's genuinely distinctive for a game this mechanically focused.
The dystopian sci-fi framing, corporations hiring drone pilots to strip-mine dead worlds for energy, sits comfortably in a tradition that fans of games like Celeste or N++ will recognize: the world exists to give the movement meaning.
Visual and audio design
Nullstar: Solus runs on pixel art that leans into its sci-fi ruins setting rather than going for nostalgia. The art direction favors atmosphere over spectacle, with environments that feel worn down and functional rather than decorative. The release date trailer, which features Alanah Pearce, gives the best sense of how the game moves and sounds in practice.
The game is single-player only, which fits the speedrunning focus. Leaderboard competition happens outside the game itself, through the community rather than built-in social features.
Conclusion
Nullstar: Solus is a focused, uncompromising precision platformer with a clear sense of what it wants to be. Eighty levels of thruster-based movement through a dead civilization's megastructure, with speedrunning at its core and enough atmosphere to make the setting feel like more than a backdrop. Smash Attack Aus has built something that appeals directly to players who want their 2D platformers demanding and their sci-fi bleak. If tight controls and fast times are what you're after, this one is worth your attention.