PAX West 2025: Death and decontamination - Talking Ambrosia Sky with Soft Rains' Joel Burgess

Consider a game development studio as a kind of fungal network. A team of interconnected individuals that work together to keep the collective, and their environment, thriving. Spanning nations, experience levels, and backgrounds, they reach harmony and produce something brand new.

That's the read we got on the team at Soft Rains after spending time chatting with Studio Head Joel Burgess, whose debut title Ambrosia Sky features fungus in a big way.

I spotlighted Ambrosia Sky's demo this summer, calling it "an incredible mix of concepts that work together perfectly." So, naturally, we jumped at the chance to meet with this team at PAX West and talk with Studio Head Joel Burgess to learn anything we possibly could about the inner workings of a game that so immediately captured us from reveal to demo.

Having spent the PAX weekend observing play sessions that Burgess called "a truth-telling serum," in the ways they revealed things about the project that reinforced the team's direction, Burgess was in just the right mindset to elucidate the ideas behind Ambrosia Sky and its development thus far.

"We've been describing Ambrosia Sky as a first-person immersive sci-fi clean 'em up," Burgess began. "It's a fusion of the kinds of first-person adventures that we know and love, entrenched with layers of story and exploration; but rather than leaning on the nostalgia of those experiences, we're trying to find something fresh and unique about it."

Burgess talked about pulling inspiration from job simulation games, cleaning games a la PowerWash Simulator, and niche games like them, and how players have embraced the rise of role-driven gameplay mechanics within the assortment. Blending the classics with something fresh like that birthed the experimentation that became Ambrosia Sky, but it all started with sci-fi — with looking at the world we live in and where we're headed.

"We wanted to explore the type of sci-fi storytelling that we want to see more of in games: looking forward, what are our anxieties, you know?" said Burgess of Ambrosia Sky's narrative. "So that led us to life beyond Earth, alternative food sources, what community means, what death means when you're living off-planet in a prolonged way."

"That stumbled us toward research into mushrooms and the fact that we don't really understand fungi and mycelium all that well compared to how we understand the animal kingdom. [...] And then we started experimenting with what that would mean in terms of gameplay mechanics, and the whole cleaning thing emerged out of that experimentation."

It was through this experimentation with fungi that Ambrosia Sky landed on its visual style, something that even in this early state is so powerfully realized, with its juxtaposition of stark space station settings with the fleshy organic fungi growth. It's a big reason why we gravitated toward the game, the painterly beauty and the near direct translation of concept art into in-game art, and Burgess credits a lot of that to Art Director Adam Volker.

"We were really inspired by Annihilation and the way color plays a role there, how they use fungus and natural shapes [to build out that world]. But it didn't really come to life until we started working with Adam on the project. We were huge fans of the work he had done on Creature in the Well and Stonefly and started thinking about how we could elevate that expressive style into a first-person environment."

From there, the team blossomed out: growing, experimenting, bringing their own experiences to the table to build something new together.

"I'm really proud of where we are with it and of the fact that we had the faith in each other to embark on this project," said Burgess. "This is not some fully formed vision that we were just waiting for the chance to make. This game was conceived of and by the team that showed up to make it. Being able to have someone like Adam, having people like [concept artists] Ysabel and Vash come into the game and begin to like define and explore the undefined spaces, so that we could let the game actually have an identity that was its own and organically grown from the collective experience of everybody that worked on it... that's what I'm really proud of."

The fungal network was being established and their bloom would become Ambrosia Sky.

We then found ourselves talking about mushrooms. About the fungal networks that work together as a community to ensure all trees in the forest are able to rise up. About death and decay. About looking into the things that might otherwise give us "the ick."

In this sci-fi adventure, players inhabit Dalia, a member of a group of field scientists called Scarabs who are trying to "solve death" by going to the sites of mass death events to study the bodies of those who've been left behind.

Dalia's uninterested in the grander scope of what this group is trying to achieve though and more interested in the hard scientific results. She's good at what she does and she likes doing it. But when her job brings her back to the Cluster — an agricultural community on Saturn's rings that she once called home — after a 15-year absence, things get way more personal.

"I'll joke with people about how Ambrosia Sky is such a light and bubbly game... and then the game's about death," laughed Burgess. "You're going back to your hometown where everybody has been wiped out by this crisis and you're the one picking up the pieces and laying them to rest."

It's a story about the care and presence that's required of us during some of the most universally challenging and emotionally complex moments in life; the ones that many want to turn away from the most. And it's explored through the fascinating perspective of someone operating with both the detachment of someone carrying out a methodical, scientific job and the inexorable attachment of someone whose formative memories are affixed to this place and its people, for better or worse.

"We've had people compare Dalia's story to those Japanese death cleaners who will come in when somebody has passed away in an apartment, who lived alone, and lay their things to rest. It's a very solitary, mundane thing. Kind of a bummer, right? But there's something there.

"It's fundamentally a part of how life works. Death, decomposition, decay, rebirth, that whole cycle. I fundamentally feel there is something really hopeful and positive about being able to confront the things that scare and repulse us. To look past them and through them. Everybody experiences death and I think this gives the story the ability to reach, resonate, and connect with anybody with any background anywhere. And it'll hopefully leave you feeling more rounded as a result of having gone through it."

"I fundamentally feel there is something really hopeful and positive about being able to confront the things that scare and repulse us."

As we talked, I thought back to the weird melancholy I'd felt when clearing out my grandmother's home. My uncle's home. Storage units for family members who'd passed away. The sadness of memory mashed with the joy of remembrance. In 2025 more than any other year, I've been thinking about death and my instinct is to hide from it. Projects like Ambrosia Sky and A Mortician's Tale — the last project led up by Soft Rains' Narrative Director Kait Tremblay, who's no novice when it comes to exploring death in games — ask us to look straight into it instead and use the lessons learned to reflect on our lives while we're living them.

With the fungal focus, Ambrosia Sky is kind of an unpredictable beast. Thinking you've cleared out one room, only to have left one little fungal fruit behind, means that coming back will have you smashing face first into a new growth of mushrooms to block your way. Systems on the space station will be inactive because the electricity-sapping fungi will have locked down doors, or another will have upended gravity in a room.

With such systems-driven gameplay, we were curious how Soft Rains built out its world and its puzzles. And it's a deceptively simple answer to describe a highly complex and creative thought process.

"In game design, we'll talk about an interaction matrix where you have every element of interaction on one axis and then copied onto the other axis," explained Burgess. "What happens when fire touches water? What happens when plasma touches poison? So on and so forth. There's kind of an exponential growth thing that happens here, which is why systemic games can be so hard to build. But it's also one of the things I like about working on this game.

"I want players to speculate about how these systems work together. I've seen people here at PAX try and experiment with combining a couple different things and find that they do interact, but just not in the way they expected. That's the kind of thing that I'm gonna be thinking about for a week after this."

Burgess talked about how Ambrosia Sky, with all its slinking parts and dynamic growths, breaks all thinking of traditional level design. Instead of using simple triggers that call for animations and lighting changes, the team at Soft Rains instead just... lets the fungus do its work. They plant the roots of, say, that electrical fungus, to procedurally grow in the moment to create a sequence in the demo that plunges the player into darkness and locks them behind a door — essentially reverse-engineering what a player will do and designing around that.

Finally, we asked Burgess about his team and history. He's got quite the résumé, having worked as a Senior Designer for many years at Bethesda, a World Director on Watch Dogs Legion at Ubisoft Toronto, and a Studio Director at Capybara Games after Grindstone came out.

We wondered just how all that might factor into the work being done at Soft Rains, how different it might feel, and what lessons have been learned along the way.

"We are creating a game that a is a byproduct of everything that everybody is bringing to the table," he said. "Some of us worked together at Bethesda or Ubi. We have people that came in from Riot. We have people working on their first game as well. There's a lot of interesting things [that come out of that] of learning how to work with each other, the mundane reality of just working together.

"This is not a team of five people who worked at the same place for ten years and they're just going to make the same thing in a different environment, so there's a natural reality to face of... the way I talk about games or build games can be different from that person and this person."

One of the most exciting things, for Burgess, was the idea of building something original with this team. He'd come from working on big IP at Bethesda and Ubisoft, and even his time at Capy came on a project that had already launched. Being able to build something new — particularly in a time where the industry feels wary of embracing new things and is instead betting on the safety of IP work — put Burgess right in front of a ton of new experiences.

"To say I'm surprised that it's been challenging would be somewhat disingenuous," admitted Burgess. "I think I'm surprised at how it's this full body, every day, every week, I'm learning a new thing that I'm not as good at as I thought I was. And that's exciting! And scary. And it leads to a lot of 'Am I even good at this? How did I not anticipate that or make that decision?'

"Being with a group like this is such a gift, because they are there to help me understand another way to do things, how I could be better. And these lessons are coming from somebody with a year of experience just as often as they do from somebody with a decade or more."

As we began to wrap up, I thought of the mushrooms in the forest again, their intricate networks hidden right under our feet — in our case, literally, as Burgess pointed out that the largest single living organism in the world is actually a massive fungus in our home state of Oregon. I thought of how they send signals, stabilize soil, and help trees living near one of these networks share resources like water and nutrients, helping the whole forest thrive.

I thought about the fear of the unknown, the "icks" we all avoid and how facing them can help us grow as people. I thought about Soft Rains embarking on this brand new project, facing the fear of an uncertain industry, leaning on one another as they learn together and grow just like the fungus they put in front of players in Ambrosia Sky.

Soft Rains' debut title is on the way — and like Joel told us at the end of our conversation, if any of what you've read here today has spoken to you, "Show up. Support the kinds of things you want to see, support the kinds of creators you want to get the chance to create. 'Cause if you don't, they won't get another chance." (Read: Wishlist the game and follow its development on social media, why don'tcha?)

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Thanks for reading our coverage direct from the PAX West show floor. If you found it interesting and want to read more hands-on game previews and interviews with developers, visit our PAX West articles. Or check out our recap stream for a behind-the-scenes on what we did, played, and saw during all four days of PAX.