Ultros Review

When the game starts, we see our character lying on the ground. She’s seemingly crashed her ship and is on a colourful alien world. You will meet a variety of characters on your journey who will tell you about this place and how things work around here. The first is a pink alien named Wallet, wearing a trench coat, hat, and scarf, who informs you that you are in the Sarcophagus. The sharp-dressed creature needs your help and introduces you to the shaman, the powerful character who messes with the continuum so no one can escapethis place; you need to track down and take them out.

Besides the shaman, you will encounter enraged beasts that you need to fight like a giant fly. Once you defeat it, the first cycle will be completed. There are seven different cycles to play through before you get to the final one where the last boss resides.

Developer Hadoque has done a lot of things in Ultros that are different from your typical game. This is a title that rewards you for taking care of the environment instead of exploiting it. You will have to garden and grow a variety of plants that will open up routes to new areas that weren't accessible before. Some plants are sturdy and are used as platforms, while others, like vines, are used to swing on like a rope. Planting becomes more important than combat if you want to progress.

As you explore this alien world, you will discover pods that you can crawl into to save your game. Here you can also unlock Cortex memories, which are essentially new abilities that help you explore and are useful when you are gardening. Each of these upgrades requires nutrition to unlock; to get that, you need to eat. You may be wondering what you will feed on in this crazy world. That’s easy; you eat parts of the creatures that you have killed. How nutritious it will be for you is based on how you killed them. If you run in slashing, you will pulverise the specimen, making it a bloody mess that won’t nourish you very much. Instead, you will want to go in with varied attacks to improve the quality of your catch.

Ultros is all about a loop system, which can seem really confusing at first, but soon you’ll see how planting a tree and coming back to that spot later on can open a new location. At first, I had no idea where to go; it felt like I had explored the whole area that was accessible. I then realised that there are other things you need to do, like leaving food in the soil to make compost to open a new path, jumping and smashing through areas of ground that have scratches of rainbow colour in them. The colour is light shining through to show that it is breakable. Unlocking new Cortexes at the pod while you are saving can help, but the game states that none of these abilities are required to progress; they just make it easier.

The art style in Ultros is simply amazing. It’s vibrant, with a hand-drawn look that makes it feel almost psychedelic-like. The use of colour and patterns felt reminiscent of things you would see in the ‘70s. It fits the setting of an unknown alien world very well and feels, unlike any other game that I have played in the past. This game is full of personality and feels like you are part of a living ecosystem where you are immersed and feel like your decisions impact this world.

The music is relaxing and very chill, which didn’t seem like it fit at first glance, but once you get into the game and realise that you spend a lot of time exploring and gardening when you need to fight, you are rewarded for not charging in and being careless. Even the creatures that you meet are friendly at first, making cute noises and pushing your character around. It’s not until you get a sword that they get aggressive and try to attack. To advance the story, you will need to cultivate the environment.

The controls to explore the environment, battle in combat, and garden all worked smoothly. I was using an Xbox controller and had no issues with performing large jumps or combos to defeat enemies. A is used to jump, B to slide, Y to interact with or counter an enemy’s attack in battle, and X is used to attack when you find a sword. Once it is killed, there is a piece to pick up and eat using LT… It sounds super gross, but it improves your stats, and it is needed to unlock Cortex abilities.

Ultros is an interesting sci-fi game that doesn’t exactly fit into any one genre. It’s not really a roguelite or roguelike, but it reminds me of games like Hollow Knight that are full of exploration and feel a bit Metroidvania-like, as there are areas that you can’t or don’t know how to access. But once you get an upgrade or through trial and error, you figure it out. There are enraged beasts, like a massive fly, that you need to battle against to get through that area and begin the next cycle. There are seven cycles to complete before you get to the final cycle of the game.

Using plants and gardening was a unique way to progress the story that I have never seen used in a game before. Cultivating the environment is really important in Ultros, which was nice to see!

If you want a game with a crazy, and colourful aesthetic and unique story element, Ultros should definitely be on your radar. There are a lot of things here that make this a new experience that I haven’t had before. Having to eat the things that you killed and being careful about the techniques you used to take them down was interesting. I never would have thought about how pulverising the “meat” would affect its nutritional value. Or gardening and planting seeds to progress the story — that was nice to see the developer making you care about the environment — even though it's on an alien planet. Ultros is a game that is hard to explain, but it’s a unique title to experience for yourself.