Ultros Game Review – A Thrilling Metroidvania on LSD

It’s not often that a game asks you to liberate a mysterious world by flying through space and planting lush, golden-leaved trees. But this isn’t a mind-bending version of Farming Simulator. At its core, Ultros is a classic Metroidvania, but it adds unusual ideas and mechanics, meditative music, and graphics so beautiful that you’ll want to take screenshot after screenshot.

• Platform: PC (review version), PlayStation 4 and 5.
• Date of publication: 02.13.2024
• Developer: Hadoke
• Publisher: Kepler Interactive
• Genre: Metroidvania
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Data for download: 5.2 GB
• Game time: 10+ hours
• Price: $24.99 (Steam)

Destruction and betting

Some games even offer a cinematic story that will eventually lead you from point A to point B. Others use the popular phrase that “the player is not led by the hand.” And then there’s Ultros. It immediately drops you into a colorful world full of twisting vines and flowers, cracked columns, and flasks full of strange liquids. It’s like being in someone else’s antique shop, with overstuffed chairs and damaged vases, but occupied by unstoppable nature. And somehow, you feel like you have to leave.

This is the Sarcophagus. A sort of meteor traveling through space, where, in addition to lush plants and smelly aggressive animals, there is also an ancient demon, Ultros. And if your heroine, a space traveler who has been shipwrecked in this unknown world, wants to escape, she will have to make her own way. Or ensure its observance.

This 2D Metroidvania combines both a brutal, destruction-focused approach with a gardener-focused approach where you create. One is quicker, sure, but the other is as time-consuming and nurturing as growing fragile houseplants outside your apartment window. As you wander the landscape, you’ll encounter creatures with strange shapes and names. Some resemble alien animals, like the pink-tentacled pom-poms with a curved blue head dotted with rows of phosphorescent eyes. Other, more humanoid creatures speak, but as if lost in a David Lynch dream. They talk about the destruction of worlds and their birth, the meaning of existence and the passage of time. Some help you, like the Gerdner who tends the flowers and trees in the Sarcophagus, while others see you as an affront to their very existence.

Break the cycle

The basic gameplay is the same as other Metroidvanias. You explore the world and search for various items and resources that will help you in the future. In the process, you fight enemies, learn more and more information, and return to places that are gradually revealed to you. But there are some original ideas that make the game “something special”.

These are the raw materials – the seeds that you can plant. Each one will grow into a different plant – one will help you jump to an inaccessible platform, another will create a creeping vine that can connect distant places. And although there are not many types of enemies, they are not particularly difficult and after a while they begin to repeat themselves, but on the other hand they force you to change your grips. The more varied your fighting style and the more different kicks and slashes you use with a sharp sword, the better the rewards you will receive from the killed monster.

The reward will probably be a larva, which you can eat along with the blue fruits growing on the grassy wall. Not only do you use them to replenish your health, but in exchange for eating certain types of food (if you can call a bloody slime-like substance food), you gain various abilities – be it grabs or even poison attacks. And beware, something that can be annoying for many people now happens, although Ultros is very clever with it: every time you successfully reach the sarcophagus with the creature associated with the central demon and “free” it, the cycle resets. And you lose (almost) everything.

Each cycle means a new beginning, but this is definitely not a roguelike. Also, the seeds you plant continue to grow as if nothing had happened, and gradually more and more parts of the Sarcophagus are revealed. The game doesn’t tell you exactly where to go, but eventually you’ll end up in the “right” room, like the one with the overgrown fly beast. Sometimes, that’s just what you need.

But this is not a polished Metroidvania that strictly follows the established rules of the genre. Rather, it makes them special and enriches them with colorful compost. Instead of fighting, it is built on an immersive world, behind which stands Niklas “El Huervo” Åkerblad. The Swedish artist who created, for example, the attractive cover of the shooter Hotline Miami. And on rhythmic music, combining dramatic strings and gentle accordion. It is not a challenge, but rather a meditative experience.