Backlog Bingo 2025: Ultros

I didn't know what to expect going into this: I picked it up in like, a Metroidvania Steam sale at some point based on good reviews and its art style. I ended up getting something that reminds me a lot of Animal Well, a game that I extremely disliked, but which I nevertheless ended up liking. (Also, I can invoke the forbidden genre name here without getting fake-banned from TCC, but also I extremely dislike the mouthfeel of that word and find it unnecessary as a sub-subgenre so I'll just stick to "you'll probably get a lot out of this if you got a lot out of Animal Well or Tunic".)

Ultros opens with your protagonist waking up from cryosleep, finding a weapon, wandering around a strange psychedelic landscape looking for a path forward, so, y'know, typical Metroidvania. Find sword, fight enemies, enemies drop their body parts as food, you can eat this to get nutrition points that you can cash in for skills, including a bunch of your movement abilities. Huh, interesting, the skill tree has a bunch of movement abilities? Why wouldn't I go for those first? (This is a surprise tool that will help us later.) At this point, though the game hadn't tutorialized it yet, I'd noticed that bonking an enemy repeatedly made it drop worse food than if I killed it in one clean combo. (This is eventually explicitly tutorialized: you get the "good drop" from killing something without ever repeating a move. This will also be important in a bit.)

At some point you work your way to the first boss, kill it, and get a cool little robot friend that floats behind you, but which also gives you your Metroidvania Official Double-Jump™. And then you walk back through a room you're forced to go through to be able to explore anything else, and get sucked into a spooky black hole and wake up in the cryosleep pod at the beginning of the game.

"If I had a nickel for every time I unknowingly played a time loop game this year, I'd have two nickels."

All of your movement abilities are gone, and you've also unlearned all of your skill tree. But the guy that you needed to kill in loop one, chilling behind that boss, is still dead. So you set out again, get back to the black hole room, and get your robot friend and double-jump back, and can head for a second boss that would have been inaccessible before. Along the way, you'll start piecing a few things together: - enemies don't respawn, so getting the "good food" means you just have more resources to work with, incentivizing "learn all of your combat tricks first" - this is directly placed against "metroidvanias live and die on movement, so I should learn all of my movement abilities first" - you can plant plants in certain plots of land, and they'll be fully grown on the next loop, letting you do things like "grow a tree here that I'll be able to jump on the next time I come through and go somewhere new" or "grow a platform hanging off this ledge so I can shortcut back here next time" - there's an item called the Mnemonic Mycelium that "locks" a skill across loops, but there aren't enough of these to lock the entire skill tree until very very near the end of the game, so now you're torn between "prioritize movement", "prioritize combat", or "prioritize things that costs tons of points to unlock so unlocking the cheaper stuff is faster at the beginning of my next run" - all of your items are gone each time, so planting as many seeds as you can, and ensuring you've spent all of your "lock a skill" mushrooms, is fairly important - every time you loop, all of your boss unlocks end up in the Spooky Black Hole Room™ which you have to go back to to get them again

The Animal Well comparisons start to make themselves obvious at this point: there's clearly a layer of metagame here that's going to keep emerging. Loop, oh, you messed up this path on the previous loop, now you have to go this other way this time, meaning tagging this boss instead of that boss is now in play. Loop, oh, this time another NPC has figured out what I'm trying to do and is going to kick me down a hole into an area I haven't been in yet. It feels really fresh, because you're never quite hitting the same areas in the same ways, and you're learning new things and new ways to use what you know each time.

And then on about loop four or five, you end up in the very bottom of the ship, where you find a plant that is the root of a thing called the Living Network. The game does not explain this at this point or ever, but this random plant is going to be the back two thirds of your game: you can touch it, and it ties a wire to you that you can move in a certain radius. Touching another plant spreads the network to that plant as well. The true ending is gated behind chaining this network to every single boss room, which involves hundreds of tiny puzzles to gain that next little bit, so you can link this to that to that to this, etc. (Networking to a save point allows you to fast travel between that and any other networked save point; networking to the save point in the "loop start" room was therefore one of the very first things I did when I could.) After killing each boss once, you get the ability to forcibly time loop (instead of having to kill a boss to do so), and you start loops with all of your stuff. This cracks the game open and starts letting you really cook on "okay, how exactly can I solve all of these tiny puzzles that I need to?"

I...really enjoyed this, despite going in with no expectations other than "a Metroidvania". I've always enjoyed games that just kinda "try shit" in the name of their own vision even if that stuff doesn't actually work, and Ultros tries a lot. Even the things that don't work for me (a couple of the unlockable abilities are very fiddly and take a lot of annoying messing-with to solve their puzzles) are the product of "this game is just doing its Thing uncompromisingly". And, yeah, I respect that a lot.

If you're looking for "just a Metroidvania"? This is an extremely hard sell: go play Nine Sols instead. ;) If you want your Metroidvaniae to be puzzle games in disguise, I can say that I really enjoyed Ultros a lot, even with its shocking cotemporality to Animal Well. (There's almost no way these games were inspired by each other, as they're too close together, and that mostly just makes the coincidence really funny.)