It needs to sing.
It needs to be explosive, or at least thoroughly radioactive.
It needs to be an agent of rapid recontextualisation.
Ultros review
Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
What are we in for here?
Action, exploration, and gardening.
So let’s discuss all of these pieces in turn.
As the words “cosmic uterus” may have suggested, this is not your typical Space Trucker fantasy.
It’s full of energy-drink greens and cocktail pinks.
It loves oranges and purples, and most of all it loves layers.
A corridor may be a grotto because glowing mushrooms have worked their way between statues of praying figures.
Elsewhere, giant space zits wait to rupture above carpets of swaying Lucozade corn.
The art team is lead by Niklas “El Huervo” Akerblad, best known perhaps forHotline Miami.
It makes exploration, just being in this world, intoxicating before you’ve even done anything here.
That brings us to combat.
It’s not about flailing, though.
All of this, but what about the gardening?
Okay, let’s deal with this loop now, in fact.
And your skill tree is reset.
It takes a potentially annoying system, then, and makes it an entertaining series of tactical choices.
But why do it at all?
It took me a while to notice this, for sure.
Maybe I could plant fungi platforms to allow me to climb higher.
But this stuff often takes time.
It takes cycles and time loops.
What Ultros does with all this is genuinely brilliant.
Suddenly you’re not evolving so much as helping to evolve the world around you.
You’re both changing, and you’re both finding new opportunities that emerge as you change.
It’s an Ovid Metroidvania!
How to land this thing?
Yesterday I was in a tank of unpromising liquid beset by saw-blades I couldn’t get past.
That’s Ultros: a green-fingered Metroidvania that wants you to experiment.
I’m on board.
