Review of the game Ultros – an exciting Metroidvania on LSD

It’s not often that a game requires you to liberate a mysterious world by flying through space and planting lush trees with golden leaves. But this is not a hallucinogenic version of Farming Simulator. At its core, Ultros is a classic metroidvania, but it brings unusual ideas and mechanics, meditative music and graphics so beautiful that you will want to take one screenshot after another.

• Platform: PC (review version), PlayStation 4 and 5.
• Publication date: 13/02/2024
• Developer: Hadoke
• Publisher: Kepler Interactive
• Genre: Metroidvania
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Download data: 5.2 GB
• Game time: 10+ hours
• Price: $24.99 (Steam)

Destruction and stakes

Some games even offer a cinematic story that will eventually take 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 throws you into a colorful world full of twisting vines and flowers, cracked columns and flasks full of strange liquids. It’s as if you’ve found yourself in someone else’s antique shop, with soft chairs and damaged vases, but inhabited by uncontrollable nature. And for some reason you feel like it’s time for you to leave.

This is the Sarcophagus. A kind of meteor traveling through space, which, in addition to lush plants and odorous aggressive animals, is also home to the ancient demon Ultros. And if your heroine, a space traveler shipwrecked on this unknown world, wants to escape, she will have to make her way. Or enforce it.

This 2D metroidvania combines both a brutal approach where you can destroy, and a gardener’s approach where you can create. One, of course, is faster, the other requires care and time, just like growing fragile indoor plants outside an apartment window. As you wander through the landscape, you will encounter creatures with strange shapes and names. Some resemble alien animals, such as pom-poms with pink tentacles and 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, about the meaning of existence and the passage of time. Some help you, such as Gerdner, who tends the flowers and trees in the Sarcophagus, 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 look for various items and raw materials that will help you in the future. As you do so, you fight enemies, learn more and more information, and return to places that gradually open up to you. But it contains several original ideas that make the game “something special.”

These raw materials are seeds that you can plant. Each will grow into a separate plant – one will help you jump onto an inaccessible platform, the other 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 rewards you will receive from the monster you kill.

The reward will probably be in the form of a grub, which you can eat along with the blue fruit growing on the grassy wall. With their help, you not only replenish your health, but also in exchange for eating certain types of food (if a bloody, slime-like substance can be called food, that is), you gain various abilities – be it grapples or even poisonous attacks. And be careful, there’s something going on now that might annoy a lot of people, although Ultros is very clever about it: every time you successfully reach the sarcophagus with a creature connected to the central demon and “free” it, the cycle is reset. And you will lose (almost) everything.

Each cycle means a new beginning, but this is definitely not a roguelike game. In addition, the seeds you planted continue to grow like nothing and gradually more and more parts of the Sarcophagus are opened. The game doesn’t tell you exactly where to go, but you end up in the “right” room, like the one with the overgrown fly-beast. It’s just necessary sometimes.

But this is not a polished metroidvania, strictly following the established rules of the genre. Rather, it makes them special and enriches them with colorful compost. Instead of fighting, it’s built around an immersive world driven by Niklas “El Huervo” Åkerblad. Swedish artist who created, for example, the attractive cover of the shooter Hotline Miami. And on rhythmic music, combining dramatic strings and gentle accordion. This is not a challenge, but rather a meditative experience.