Ultros (2024)

I love this, however i am deep into the game now and still do not fully know where to navigate next, I feel like a renegade to order as I randomly select something that looks like it needs doing maybe for reasons I do not understand. Then plant a tree that maybe may be useful, I am not sure.

Beautiful game.

The style of this game is certainly unique; vibrant colors provide for the background for this game of combat, exploration, puzzles, and upgrades as you explore a giant space womb infected with evil. I expected many frustrations and there were lots of those, especially with what felt like all avenues of exploration cut off numerous times because I hadn't taken some extremely out of the way passage on some entirely separate level from the one I was stuck on. Still, any game that offers damage reduction as an option to overcome sometimes too difficult combat isn't all frustration.

I didn't get the good ending because I couldn't connect enough of the living network. This was fun enough that I could imagine myself coming back to it for a future replay focused on completion.

I played some of Steam Deck but ended up playing most of my time on PC with a controller.

Snuck an hour more than I should have of this before sleeping last night.

Finding it lovely so far, It judges your combat performance through loot, I am mildly worried by this fact, for, uh skill issues.

Love the concept though!

I'mma gonna be like that reviewer who said DMC had bad music by the end of it, so rubbish I've nae heard it, or seen the loot ;)

Can someone help me out here? Do plants only grow in between cycles? I can't get to the pool in Infinity Lake because the gardens I've planted are too small and thus far apart to connect to the network. I'm in cycle 5 and I don't see anywhere else I can reach where I can start a new cycle. You can see my garden here

Ultros does that thing where the game that you think it is when you start playing is but a sliver of the game it becomes by the end, and as such I want to avoid any major spoilers for the mechanics, which is a problem because this game is all mechanics. The story is, if we're being generous, fairly opaque. If we're being less generous it's nonsense, just a bunch of tropy sci-fi/weird horror stuff tossed in a pot and stirred together until it turns rainbow. It's the gameplay that keeps this mess from falling apart and. It's. So. Goddamn. Good. And so much effort is put into making each phase of the game feel like a full game. Like, there are incredibly clever design decisions that only really matter for the middle 10 hours of the game.

I say phases but just to be clear, this isn't like Inscryption or Nier: Automata—Ok, well it's more like Nier: Automata than Inscryption—but anyway the point is there aren't exactly distinct phases of the game in that way. You play as the same character the whole time, on the same map. But as you collect abilities what you're able to do changes so much that what you're trying to do will also change, and it's these developments that naturally give the game a sort of 3-act structure (or like, 2.5-act? The 2nd and 3rd acts can overlap a bit depending on how you play.)

The game also does very little to explain itself explicitly, with only cursory tutorials of the core mechanics and the various plant types. But there's plenty of diegetic guidance, whether it be blocking off all but the key route at certain parts of the game, or placing an item right next to a good spot to use it so you can immediately start to learn what it does. On the early occasions when I started to feel stuck and frustrated, I just kept playing, exploring every possible avenue, and eventually I figured what the game wanted me to do next by dint of it being the only possible thing to do. And after each such occasion I immediately discovered a new ability or item that opened the map up in ways it hadn't been before, which is the absolute peak experience of a metroidvania. Do yourself a favor and avoid walkthroughs for this one for as long as you can (I did look up a plant guide later in the game when I was starting to get into the nitty gritty of the horticultural mechanics, but that was well after I got the first of the three (as far as I know) possible endings.)

That being said, toward the very tail-end of my experience, when I was trying to do a few very specific things to get to the last few unexplored spots on my map, I did start to get frustrated, not just with the game's lack of explanation, but also with the jank that was becoming more and more apparent, and the tedium of having to restart the loop over and over just to progress one particular goal. What really got me was putting probably upwards of 5 hours into accomplishing a specific task (that I don't want to spoil the nature of) to get a part of the map, before finding, in quick succession, 1) a better way of doing it that I could've been doing all along, and then 2) a workaround that skipped this task entirely that I could've done at any point and that would've saved all 5+ of those hours. After that I found my enthusiasm waning and I figured I should wrap it up before I really started to hate this game.

So, while you can get lost in the weeds towards the end, for the most part Ultros delivers the best of what a metroidvania can be, gameplay-wise, and does so with smart, thoughtful design, and with innovative mechanics that you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

p.s. Also, I played with the sound on the whole time and never once put on a podcast, which is rare for me for games that are neither story-focused nor particularly reliant on sound cues. The music is decent enough but mostly it's just that the game has a vibe and I never felt bored enough to mess with that vibe.

p.p.s. As much as I poo-poo the story I did like the reveal that the bottom area of the ship is a luxury resort that was founded by people who I guess just discovered the ship floating in space and they're just like, "Were ancient gods worshipped here? I dunno, probably. Enjoy your complimentary mai tai!" It's pretty funny, but also the idea that this whole ship is just layers of civilizations increasingly removed from its origins is neat.

This game's an interesting one, I'm not sure where I'll land on it just yet. It duly goes through the motions of a tepid metroidvania while you explore the first five levels, only to recontextualize everything by revealing a late-game mechanic of wiring together different nodes across the map. It's a fun twist, and the wiring stuff seems neat so far (even if it's just a fiddlier take on shinespark puzzles from Metroid).

But holding back the unique draw of the game til well past the halfway point is a rough sell when the first half is full of such joyless, perfunctory movement and level design. The core platforming has no flavor, none of the upgrades you get are fun to use, the map is stiflingly linear and boring to navigate. I wouldn't mind if Ultros had shown its hand a little earlier.

Definitely a neat game. Progression is very organic for a Metroidvania, a genre that typically gate-keeps player exploration through very obvious contrivances, and its time loop concept is used to interesting effect in the myriad options the player has to interact with the game world. I really like that you have to earn your progress in this game, too. Nothing is handed over easily. The world demands to be navigated through with an active brain. I wish more games had the guts to ask as much of their players as Ultros does.

It falls just short of a recommendation from me simply because I have small gripes with pretty much every area of its design. The controls and combat, while certainly not bad, felt clumsy and loose to me. Nothing clicked completely even all the way up to credits. Many of the stage gimmicks slowed down the pace of the exploration in ways I didn't care for. The art and animation, while mostly very colorful and detailed, looked cheap in places to me and at times the busyness of the screen made it hard to tell what was interactive and what were just background elements. Lastly, certain aspects of the game felt over-designed and crossed my personal threshold of arduousness: the nutrition/skill system specifically comes to mind.

But overally I liked it, and I'm glad I stuck it through. It's definitely one of the most original Metroidvanias I've played in a while, if nothing else. Looking forward to what this team does next, because clearly they are kicking around some very compelling and ambitious ideas that I could see generating something really special in the future.

Ultros puts its foot forward with one of the most unique art styles I've ever seen and its striking colours and squishy aesthetics alone are strong enough to carry a game. The game is simply gorgeous and every single background and character sprite is a piece of art. The music is also

Most games would've left it at that, but Ultros then layers so many well-developed gameplay mechanics that it keeps surprising you time and time again. I feel that going into details might be spoiling a lot of the message but the way all the systems interact with each other to support the game's main message is amazing and is a demonstration of what the interactive nature of video games can achieve.

It is really a shame that Ultros hasn't been talked about more because it is such a gem of a game.

I finally got to it. I had to get the upgrade that makes the line thingy longer before it breaks and use compost to make a plan grow larger and restart a couple of times to get lucky with how it grew, but eventually I got there.

Metroidvania's annoyances aside, this is such an unique game. I don't think I ever played a game that did the whole paradigm shift from violence to pacifism so well. It's got several layers of meaning and subversion of expectations that all work together to say what it wants to say. Even it's marketing, with it's epic trailer filled with carnage works towards it.

It's kind of sad that it has been essentially ignored by the public. I hope that it finds its audience with time. I could see it becoming a cult classic.