marrow #16 | posted 17 april 2025
ultros is a 2024 metroidvania and it kinda slays until it doesn't (a phrase i use a lot and that seems to be the exact opposite opinion most of the steam reviews hold). the game looks very good, it plays well and runs smoothly, nice accessibility options including a background saturation slider and damage reduction. the music is... there, inoffensive enough to fade into the background. the story. it took me 15 hours to finish (getting both endings), which seems great for my tastes but felt too long, for reasons i believe will become clear in the review.
here's the basic premise. your goal is to kill eight shamans chilling in some pods. doing so will give you one 'vania upgrade and also end the current loop, sending you back to the beginning without your inventory and skills. as you progress, you can lock skills in place so they persist across loops (the item is quite generously given imo), and the world around you persists as well. one of the main game mechanics is planting seeds in some spots around the map, which can serve as shortcuts and light puzzle solutions, as well as giving you fruits to replenish hp and give you nutrition to unlock skills. when you advance loops, plants grow and new planting spots can appear.
now the subversion, and at this point that's surely just a subgenre: waow... you've been given a sword so you immediately used it but you can feed the enemies... and you don't have to kill the shamans... turns out there's a 'living network' that has been severed, and you can rebuild it by linking up plants. so it becomes instantly clear that a good ending means connecting those shamans you've been killing to the network. the game is actually about tending to this ecosystem so you can get the umbilical cord of the network to the eight shamans, so you now also have the task of going back to areas you've "cleared" to plant things and link things up.
okay sure i'm alright with that. kinda overdone, we're ten years past undertale, but the plants seem to become a nice meta puzzle. and backtracking into the first boss room i was taught its favorite food, so "oh", i thought, "i can feed the bosses too! neat". uh i was actually wrong! you can feed exactly two bosses, but pacifisting the rest is an involved process, and if you miss the method before getting to the boss room (likely) you're fucked out of luck. you can reload a save (might not help, or set you back so so long ago it's entirely undesirable), but realistically you're gonna kill the boss, end the loop, and then maybe come back for the achievement while doing the pacifist shaman — an equally involved process because this map is actually pretty huge and getting the plants in place to link the network takes time.
see, during the midgame slog a beautiful lotus of understanding bloomed in my mind. i was like neo seeing the numbers in the matrix. this game wants you to get the bad ending despite the both of you knowing it's the bad ending, and then coming back and grinding all that completionist bullshit for the good one — this was basically confirmed textually with the violent path ending, which was written soooo clunkily to get me to go back and do the non violent path. i hate this kind of gameplay. and here it seems so out of place. it's not commentary on how violence is easy but the hard thing is more rewarding, at least not effective commentary, because the game is the thing deciding what is easy and what isn't. and violence is not even that easy, because you'll want to connect at least a few savepoints into the network for the convenient warping and shortcuts! nor is nonviolence particularly rewarding!
i'm pretty confident that you cannot actually complete the game without picking up your sword / killing anything, at least not casually. so what it even is the point.
this, i believe, is either the cause or consequence (why not both?) of game design brain. an obsession with making sure the player behaves as intended, so they can experience your vision exactly. now, these are words i pen in bed at 3am, so don't expect me to cite sources or other examples, but this is how i felt ultros, despite a veneer of freedom to interact with the environment. i really do think i'm onto something here. if you're confident your design is Good Game Design, you'll want to keep the player from ruining their own fun.
that's why the movement in this game is so restrictive (specially for an exploration-based [citation needed] metroidvania). your dash kills your momentum. there's a handful of movement skills that i unlocked early on (wall cling, a slightly higher jump if you time it right, longer dash, air backdash [SUCKS]) and i can confidently say i didn't use any of them — i'll accept this being a skill issue of mine but i promise it wasn't for lack of trying. on the other hand, the map has several "one way gates", where if you fall you are just not going back up, regardless of your unlocks and whether you've been through this area before — this happened to me more than once in areas you're forced to do a boss battle, and bosses respawn when you loop. they don't even give any fucking rewards. you just go through the motions again for no reason.
you can tell the devs have designed a path for you to take and by god they'll make you take it. this is the reason behind my provocative title: it's very transparent that plenty of thought went into planning out what i'm supposed to learn and execute. the game wants to be clever more than it wants to be good: it needs you to see all its clever things, it needs you to have the lightbulb moments the devs came up with.
and ultros does have good clever mechanics. i liked the push and pull of the food system: do i eat this to get a new skill, do i use it to befriend an enemy or should i simply keep it for healing? i liked thinking ahead with planting seeds, and figuring out the best plant for a spot. but those feelings didn't last. but mechanics alone won't save you, and the game often does not even use the mechanics, and instead comes up with new ones that suck instead — ball juggling, where you fight against the janky ass 2d physics, and stealth, because of course there'd be a stealth segment. here's an idea: why not have puzzles where you use the upgrades you get on plants that are already planted? oh maybe that'd trivialize linking the network and we can't be having that now can we. i don't know, the nonviolent end speedrun looks like a more fun version of the game with its splicing and plant routing, but this is really far from a casual playthrough since the seed deficit makes it hard to experiment and the map is rather too large to go seed hunting, and i really cannot figure out the trick to jump with the trimmer (i think you pogo off it?).
so yeah what happens is that the midgame is a slog because the novelty of figuring out the main mechanics has worn off and they didn't put any platforming in this metroidvania. the difficulty simply plateaus hard. this is where the shitty stealth and ball juggling comes in. in literally any good 'vania these would simply have been platforming sections that push you harder and have you use the tools you've been unlocking, and they'd play with new enemies and their placement. here? the environments are samey and enemy variety is basically nonexistent, so you're now just kinda running around a large and boring map.
i mean, fuck, take hollow knight. you knew this was coming. it's the one metroidvania i really did clear, i love the damn game, we all do. it's not mechanically dense, and as much as everyone copies the charm system or whatever, the reason it's good comes down to good and memorable levels and music and bosses and story, right? take pseudoregalia, certainly the best platformer i've ever played: it's not really inovating with its mechanics (hell it uses hk's healing almost exactly) but focused on making the environments memorable and distinct and densely interconnected and the movement complex and flexible. mechanics alone won't save you: the mechanics of a metroidvania are tools, not the destination. ultros feels like game maker's toolkit fodder: it's competent, but nothing else.
well i'm glad i got this on sale for a more or less reasonable 30 reais. it slots neatly into the "recent games that are praised but i found terribly disappointing" group, above nine sols but below void stranger. 6/10, probably don't play this.