Ultros is beautiful. This is obvious from the game's cover art, let alone the in-game graphics. There is no art style quite like what Niklas Åkerblad does. It is psychedelic biology - combining an acid trip with nature and biology. To be quite honest, the imagery alone in this game is worth the price and time of a playthrough.

Ultros is a difficult game in some aspects but not in others. It has generally easy combat that rewards you for perfecting your skills. There is a pretty large upgrade system with things to work towards. But the game itself is a bit obtuse. It tells you nearly nothing and you're left to figure stuff out on your own. To the game's benefit, it is well designed in that there is a certain flow to the game.

Ultros is a metroidvania but equally as much a rogue-lite. You will do some backtracking but it's largely just to go back and get a specific upgrade you need for completing the new loop. The way Ultros' progression is designed is that each section of the world map is essentially its own loop. Once you complete the loop, you'll naturally head towards a different, unexplored corner of the map. I think it's important for people to understand the game's design to prevent the frustration that may come with the game's abstractness and lack of direct information.

The story in Ultros is good and plays very well into the theme and graphics of the game, but it's also not too in-depth. There's no voice acting and cutscenes are short and relatively basic from an animation perspective. Again, the graphics are the foundation of the game's design.

What I love about Ultros aside from looking at it is how rewarding it is for someone who wants to dig deep into the complexities of the game. It is very rewarding for someone who wants to take notes on the different types of plants, wants to connect all of the map together, and wants to complete the game through its pacifist ending. I'm not the type of person to commit that much into a game but I love dipping my toes in and seeing how layered a game is. Ultros for many people might seem a bit too simplistic but for those that want to dig deep, there's a lot of complexity, strategy, and puzzle solving to it.

Ultros will be remembered for its imagery. It's such a visually stunning and evocative game that it's hard not to be disappointed that the mechanics of the game don't match the impossibly high levels of its graphics. While not bad, it's really just a bit too easy. It's not a fast-paced combat system which I think makes the argument for it to be more difficult, as you can strategize mid-combat and reset pretty easily without fear of death. I think anyone with a little patience, a sense of exploration, and the willingness to just live in the world they're playing will have a great time in Ultros. It's not designed to be like Dead Cells with fast-paced, snappy combat. It's an experience - one certainly worth diving into.

A ousadia da Hadoque nesse metroidvania é incrível. Muita gente fala – e com razão – sobre a direção de arte (e sim, esse é um dos jogos mais bonitos e visualmente únicos que já joguei). Mas, além disso, ela pega o gênero metroidvania – repleto de convenções – e as quebra, trazendo um frescor para um tipo de jogo tão saturado, onde até as falhas e imperfeições são facilmente perdoadas pelo tanto que ele inova. Durante a maior parte do jogo, eu estava apaixonado – no meu coração, foi como a primeira vez que joguei Hollow Knight.

Mas, ao chegar no que era necessário para alcançar o final verdadeiro, alguns problemas me desanimaram: um sistema de fast travel meio punitivo e a lentidão na progressão entre os loops. Os problemas de portabilidade para o Switch também pesaram – mas, quem sabe, um path de atualização resolva isso. No fim, acabei ficando com o "bad ending", por assim dizer... Achei lindo o final verdadeiro (vi no YouTube) e é uma pena que ele não seja tão acessível para boa parte dos jogadores.

I really wanted to like Ultros; there's something special at its core. Well, there are two things. The overall vibes are immaculate, both presentation and story drip in psychedelic adult swim style, kaleidoscopic at every second and completely maximalist. There's also a very interesting mechanic with a focus of being at one with nature and wiring together a "Living Network" to create an internal nervous system and hopefully break the cycle…

One of the greatest failings for Ultros for me was the cycle system which robs you of your upgrades, equipment, and inventory and deposits you at the beginning of your adventure, turning back to chronal clock every time our character destroys a macguffin. This feature, I think, is poorly handled. I don’t think there’s no reason to strip a character of their abilities. On one hand this could encourage experimentation, a reason to change which upgrades you go for. There are a few reasons this was frustrating during my time. The first is that during combat you’re expected to use as many different unique moves as possible which nets you a “prime” item drop. If you fail this, and clumsily reuse attacks, you’ll batter and ruin the meat. At first I thought this was a great way to mitigate the boredom in backtracking over the same areas during a cycle reset but many of your attacks are tied to your upgrade tree which is stripped every reset. The prime mechanic demands you either remember which upgrades you have at any given time or take the actually reasonable course of picking a handful of attacks that you will always spec into first, and will always open combat with. So I wasn’t encouraged to experiment at all. In fact, by the last few cycles I stopped engaging with combat at all. Ultros makes the decision to combine your healing and experience resource into one item. You’re encouraged cheese through with healing because you can only hold so much experience before your need to cash it in at a save point or simply waste the excess while healing. I had decided to just stack heals and tank through everything and this worked in every encounter. This was further encouraged by what was essentially the only exploration reward which allowed you to lock in an upgrade between runs. I locked in the main movement mechanics (and left out the ones that made moving around feels worse which is wild) and a couple combat moves and called it a day. From here on I didn’t bother interacting with the upgrades, but I didn’t feel great about it. I continued not to have any trouble with combat but it was disappointing to get to a point where the mechanics are sorta strong armed me into not caring about rewards.

Throughout Ultros there are little garden plots where, if you’ve obtained the requisite seeds, you can plant a strange Scavenger’s Reign style plant. These interact with the environment in dynamic ways and will grow over cycles. Here in this mechanic I think is Ultros' greatest potential strength and just might be what hooks certain people but again this just did not work for me. I had some fun in the early game experimenting with the plants and working their interactions and growth. It was clear that there was something else lurking beneath the dirt, however, and when I found it I was so excited! The Living Network. Nodes which need to be connected by energy. You’re required to think outside the box to understand which is the best plant for each specific area, just barely stretching out the energy node to node. This unlocks doors and better yet, you can fast travel between any spots in the network. For just under an hour I had a great time running around connecting the world and it felt great. I couldn't help but think this was the permanence needed in the game! And then I made a cycle reset. All my seeds were gone. Which plants to use became obvious and I was just left with the tedium of finding the plants. The hard crash from the height of enthusiasm is what nearly killed the game for me, but then I entered the Pantheon of Stars and it died a thousand deaths. Such a bad area which only functioned to show me how broken the combat was with near infinite health, how awkward the movement was. Frustration melted over, and I lost it. I stopped playing.

A shame but I just don’t think Ultros does enough with its core premise. It didn’t feel good to move around the world, it actively created a loop in which rewards mostly felt meaningless, created a focus on combat performance while both narratively shying away from it and creating mechanical friction in engaging in it. Even the best thing about Ultros, the jaw dropping presentation, creates issues with conveyance and melds almost every area together into the same maximalist grey putty in my mind.

There were moments I really felt the potential here but it just aint it.