Every inch of Ultros is teeming with life, and it’s a testament to its themes of ecological preservation that not a single drop of its design goes to waste. The title is illustrated in a way that reflects the game’s cyclical growth patterns, each letter mutating a bit more than the previous one; the in-game font looks like a clustering, wriggling mass of bacterium; and the lurid, psychedelic setting known as The Sarcophagus plausibly depicts the behaviors of a living spaceship. Everything, big and small, within this revitalization of the Metroidvania works to stylishly demonstrate the game’s commitment to giving life to ecosystems.
Though there’s no shortfall of alien worlds throughout video game history, they’re too often defined through a lens of violence. While you do gain a tanto sword early on in Hadoque’s puzzle platformer, and can use a limited set of melee attacks to engage various organisms, the game is steadfast in discouraging combat, right down to the Undertale-esque way in which it provides alternative ways of defeating its bosses, or feeding and befriending the local wildlife.
Learning to be one with the environment—to heal The Sarcophagus—is the end game in Ultros, and the tools the game provides in its skill tree and set of extractor tools are meant to help players focus on methodically chaining together a network of plants rather than on chaining together melee attacks. That’s not to say that you don’t fight in Ultros, but as with everything else in the game, combat is focused more on efficiency and respect for the living than on splashy kill counts. (You level up your skill tree by eating the nutrient-rich fruits you grow and meat you cleave from foes. Sloppily dispatch your enemies and their flesh sours with “undue trauma.”) The further you progress into the game, the less you’re required to fight, meaning that those trying to hack and slash their way through Ultros will be disappointed.
Ultros’s other high-concept feature is a fresh twist on games with roguelike progression loops. After your first visit to the Humidicrib, the womb-like center of The Sarcophagus, the demonic Ultros is born and the game essentially starts anew, your character once more waking up sans weapon or extractor device and needing to relearn most of the skill tree. (There’s a limited fungal collectible that allows some skills to be biologically retained across loops.) But while the player essentially begins from scratch on each run, The Sarcophagus continues to grow.
By your second cycle through the game, the Ogu Mumin seed you planted during the first run has now bloomed into a stocky tree whose crown is solid enough to provide a shortcut-enabling boost. These 10 seed types, which include variants that sprout swinging vines from the ceiling or golden speed-boosting meadows that you can run across (or up), are the game’s traversal-enhancing tools. Environmental platforming is a deeply rooted part of the Metroidvania genre, but what elevates it in Ultros is how quickly it evolves beyond the familiar double- and wall-jump abilities. Instead of accessing ever more acrobatic abilities, players modify The Sarcophagus itself, harmonizing with nature as they cultivate an organic pathway to each goal.
Possibly the most impressive thing about Ultros is the extent to which it goes out to justify every single choice that it makes. The time-loop mechanism isn’t being utilized because it’s trendy, but rather because it underlines how the time and deliberation that it takes to repair The Sarcophagus is of a piece with the ecological heart and soul of the game. The easier, less-satisfying ending simply has you fly away on your ship, abandoning The Sarcophagus, which feels like a pretty damning indictment of all the callous billionaires on Earth that would rather build impenetrable bunkers or colonize space than learn to be harmonious with the planet.
Regardless of the ending you pursue (both are obtainable on a single playthrough, thanks to the looping mechanism), Ultros—much like the similarly masterful and boundlessly curious Outer Wilds—demands that you learn its language. Each of the seven major intestinal or amniotic biomes has its own homegrown defenses, from the eye-stalk cameras in the Pantheon of the Stars that you can hide from under canopies of your own growing, to the spinning-rotors in the fluids of the Geggamoja Refinery, which can be disabled by tangling their engines in vines.
Once you’ve invested deeply enough in these tactics, the game doubles down by asking you not just to overcome a single room’s obstacles, but to show that you understand how all of the biomes are connected. The in-game map is particularly suited for this task, as it keeps a record of each plant’s locations (and orientations) and displays the floral trail of microorganisms you reconnect as a neon rainbow trail rising through The Sarcophagus’s umbilical cord and, eventually, the whole map—like a neural network sparking to life on a CAT scan.
Ultros respects its players enough to make them work hard for the best ending. Accordingly, it never feels like a waste of time to manually connect your save points to the overall network (so that you can fast travel between them) or to gather the right seeds, spray them into the proper orientation, and occasionally splice together parts into hybrid platforms. If anything, these deliberate actions serve to sow a deeper sense of purpose and understanding of conservation in players. In doing so, Hadoque’s marvelous creation stands leafs and branches above not only other puzzle platformers, but most other socially conscious games as well.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Kepler Interactive.
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