Reviews: Ultros
Spoiler free review of the game Ultros played on the steam deck OLED.
At Margot Plays, I review games that I have played, focused on my experience, which is evolving as I play more games. In general the games’ story will have been completed, on easy mode if applicable and unless stated otherwise played on the steam deck OLED.
About the game
ULTROS is a psychedelic metroidvania where you wake up stranded on The Sarcophagus — a cosmic uterus holding an ancient, demonic being. Trapped in the loop of a black hole, you will have to explore The Sarcophagus and meet its inhabitants to understand the part you play...
Margot’s stats
Device: Steam Deck Oled
Difficulty: N/A
Completed:
Time: ~13 hours
Summary: This is a psychedelic experience and I appreciated the visual feast for the eyes after playing more of Hollow Knight recently. I enjoyed the art style and soundscape that comes with the world a lot. There are a lot of things though that just weren’t quite right for me, to really be able to recommend it. If you love metroidvanias, it is worth giving it a go for something a bit different, but be aware that the execution of all the elements together may not work well. I’d say, try the demo and see if you want to see more.
Narrative and Gameplay
The game takes place after you crash land on an alien planet. While psychedelic, the imagery and language around you is a lot about birth and life and planting. Some of it is more on the nose than others. There is a definite artistic feel to the game, with very detailed art and backgrounds, which can get a bit lost among all the colours. It feels like a mix between maximalism with some hippie chic.
As you explore you come across a weapon and a character that hints at there being something like cycles. Once you have the sword the alien creatures around you are more hostile to you. These look interesting from a character design and some of the bigger bosses are not easy on the eye and could have come from a colourful horror game. I liked them though, they were very creative to look at and while never difficult to beat, they were still fun to fight.
Combat
Fighting is a mechanic that results in you gaining different parts of flesh from the beings as a reward. This can be consumed to raise your stats, which in turn will allow you to gain skills from a standard web of skills. However as your skills improve you are encouraged to fight the alien creatures with varying moves to ensure the flesh does not get beaten into a pulp. If you manage to not re-use a move you will have better rewards to eat and it will be easier to build up your skills.
I found this to be an interesting way to try and ensure that the player doesn’t just hack and slash their way through the game (Hello, it’s me, the button masher :D ). I did try and vary my attacks, but not too hard and generally this was fine. There isn’t exactly a parry move, but if you time rolling right you can do a backstab type move which seemed to be the most effective way to fight some of the more dangerous creatures.
While you expand your skills in the skill tree you also come across a device called the Connector which adds a couple of other abilities as you progress and unlock them. These are unlocked throughout the game chapters rather than through any skill levelling. One of those being the double jump, which is strange in a way as a wall jump is unlocked in the skill tree instead.
In general though the connector unlocks abilities to interact with the world more rather than personal skill abilities.
Apart from the aforementioned double jump, I thought this was a nice way to separate abilities especially when it came to unlocking new areas of the map. You generally needed to upgrade the connector for this and not your own skills.
Plants
A mechanic that tries to do something now and that helped with the exploration was the growing of plants. This initially seems like a big and important deal. You can unlock skills around growing plants for example. And I was obsessed with planting every available patch with a plant. Not always thinking about which type of plant I would use but it seemed important to plant. I think being a bit more considerate in the planting can help with certain achievements later on in the game and unlocking one of the endings. But that was difficult to spot for me early on. The game also introduces a couple of extra mechanics around the planting and growing of plants that I tried out but didn’t seem to work. I may have done them wrong or not waited long enough for them to trigger, perhaps.
From this you may realise that I am a bit confused and intrigued about the game but then it may have been not well enough executed to keep me going to find all the secrets and try all the different things.
Cycles
Now let’s get into why I think certain things did not work too well. The game is doing something different in the metroidvania world. It works on cycles, which I hinted at earlier, and as part of these everything is reset … including your skills … including your double jump! *cries*. What is this madness!? How dare they take my double jump! Is what happened in my head the first time the cycle happened. So in a sense this adds a bit of a roguelite element.
But not everything is lost every time. You can find memory that you can equip onto your stat skills, and when or if you do find your connector again, this will have the powers you previously unlocked. This mechanic especially was a bit strange to me. Normally before a cycle restarts you would find a new power for your connector, which you then get to use once but then you lose the device and have to find it again. Maybe it was my own fault for racing to restart the cycle. But you don’t always have a choice.
The third time I went through the cycle I sighed. But not every cycle is copy paste repetitive. Some follow a different character and don’t necessarily repeat every area, so just when I thought I don’t want to do this anymore, more stuff happened and I was drawn in for a bit longer.
Exploration
This brings me to exploration. Exploration is well done and in true metroidvania fashion you can in theory go anywhere that you can reach. So much so that you will end up losing a couple of hours running around aimlessly and not achieving much. This was a bit frustrating. Also there aren’t really any guides out there so you are kinda on your own. Haha! In general though, the map is good, and can be opened up by growing different plants in certain places, finding secret walls, and gaining connector abilities. I did find it curious that unless a plant was planted all other opened secret walls were just closed again with every cycle which made it harder to explore effectively.
There is a way to unlock some fast travel about halfway through the game using an umbilical cord system. Like I said there is lots here about life and birth and several things are literal.
Recommend or … ?
So where do I stand with this game. Considering its visuals and theme (I am a keen gardener) I was hoping to be grabbed more. Maybe because the map is not really filled with enemies and enemy encounter, it felt a bit boring, beyond trying to understand the cryptic lore and story.
To me there are a lot of great ideas here but all are executed just well enough to work, and with some more deep focus on a couple this might have been more enjoyable as a consumer of the game. Perhaps removing combat altogether and just focusing on the plants, and creature ecosystem would have been enough for this game and making this mechanic really striking and rewarding to do.
If you want to play something different with great concepts and ideas, this is worth a go, but I can’t promise a great time, as I didn’t have a great time for the full story, just an ok time. Maybe if you are more of a lore hunter and puzzler, you will like a couple of the aspects of the game that I didn’t appreciate. The story itself is not bad, it’s just a lot of stuff around it that if tightened and made less of, could have been really cool.
I want to commend the game for being different and having some new ideas. It is visually striking and growing the plants was fun.
There is also a stunning looking Design works book being created for it. So if you do like it or just the art there is the book to have a look at too.
How do you end reviews when you don’t know whether to recommend or not? :D
Wow, "psychedelic " is very apt!
Yeah.... it looks cool and I love the colour scheme, I don't know if i would try it as i'm not a huge fan of side scrollers and get a bit frustrated. Thanks for giving us your thoughts!