Ultros is a rare occasion where you can judge a book by its cover. It’s a Metroidvania whose dreamlike psychedelic visuals are matched by a dreamlike psychedelic tone and a dreamlike psychedelic approach to exploration. But as in dreams, there’s an internal logic to it – an intuitive strangeness that reprograms your brain with each successive step you take.
I’m about four hours into Ultros at this point, and the particulars of what’s happening are hazy, but I am piecing them together: You wake up in the repeating, miasmatic labyrinth of The Sarcophagus, which the game’s developers describe as “a cosmic uterus holding an ancient, demonic being.” You are trying to break free from The Sarcophagus – or perhaps release the demonic being contained within; I’m not sure yet – but each time you accomplish a core objective on your path to doing so, the game loops. You wake up again, in the same spot, with your skill tree back at square one.
This might sound frustrating, but it’s not. You quickly begin finding items that allow you to lock skills of your choosing into place across multiple loops, and you come across resources to re-unlock others in short order. This might also make the game sound like a roguelite, but that’s not quite the case either. Loop mechanics give way to good old-fashioned Metroidvania exploration, with each loop exposing you to new abilities and opening up new wings of a big map full of secret paths.
All of this serves as flavor for what – at least so far – is more of an experience than an especially challenging video game (though I’ve heard there’s a puzzle near the end that’s pretty diabolical). The game world is marvelously alien, a buzzing hive of many-armed oddities who will either claw out your guts or follow you around adoringly depending on how you approach them. You can accomplish the latter – and so much more – through gardening, of all things. Glowing plots of soil dot the landscape, allowing you to plant various seeds that sprout into all manner of ethereal trees and pulsating tendril tangles. These yield different fruits, which you can feed to enemies to win their affections or eat to alter several “nutrition” meters and open up your skill tree. Again, most skills are not super necessary for main path progression, but they’re fun. For example, if I eat enough of a particular kind of fruit to max my “HWK” nutrition meter, enemies will no longer detect my scent, and many will cease to perceive me as a threat entirely.
More meaningful progression is story-based and tied to a device you find that I can only describe as a “little umbilical dude.” Each subsequent loop grants it a new ability, like hacking down path-blocking plant brambles or temporary flight – in other words, pretty standard Metroidvania stuff. But what I really appreciate about Ultros is how naturally you sort of stumble into where you need to go next, how the game invisibly guides you through its arresting acid trip. Each loop starts you in the same spot, but it’s rarely unclear which part of the map you should set a course for. Exploration pretty much always yields interesting results. From the outset, the story bombards you with strangeness – characters you’ve never met casually tossing around proper nouns you’ve never heard – but it never seeks to overwhelm. Instead, it immediately pulls you into a web of intrigue, of desiring to learn more about who these celestial beings are and what this place is about – and of course, who you are in relation to them. To return to an earlier comparison, Ultros borrows the propulsive quality of dreams; you always have at least an approximate sense of what you’re supposed to be doing, and what you don’t know yet, you will know eventually if you just keep doing stuff.
It’s a difficult feeling to convey in words, but the bottom line is, Ultros makes its brazen brand of bizarreness feel natural. The game’s world might appear unruly and overgrown, but it’s undergirded by a confident clockwork. It’s just good in that no-nonsense way other Metroidvania classics like Hollow Knight are. It knows what it is, it knows what it wants to do, and so far, it’s doing it.
Oh, and the soundtrack rules, too.
