Sorry to get all TikTok MBA on you, but if you’re employing the rule of three in your marketing, you really want to make that third element count. It needs to sing. It needs to be explosive, or at least thoroughly radioactive. More than anything, it needs to upend any breezy certainties that elements one and two have lulled you into. It needs to be an agent of rapid recontextualisation.
Ultros reviewPublisher: Kepler InteractiveDeveloper: HadoquePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 13th February on PC, PS4 and PS5.
Thank you for attending my TED Talk. And look at the giant screen behind me and you’ll see Ultros, a Metroidvania that mints pure gold from the rule of three. What are we in for here? Action, exploration, and gardening. Wait. Gardening? What? Where am I?
The first two of these elements, in Ultros’ case, are relatively easy to get your head around. It’s the third that, for me, took a while to make its influence – and its fascinating impact – clear. So let’s discuss all of these pieces in turn. But first, let’s talk about the art, because, the rule of three aside, the art is the primal draw here.
Ultros casts you as a sort of prog space explorer who’s crash landed on a giant cosmic uterus called the Sarcophagus. Trapped in the endless time loop of a black hole – we’ll get to that in a bit – you must find your bearings, talk to anyone you find who wants to talk, fight with anyone or anything that is well past talking, and basically work out what’s going on and what you need to do to fix everything.
As the words “cosmic uterus” may have suggested, this is not your typical Space Trucker fantasy. Ultros’ 2D worlds are delivered in thick felt pen lines and following a raiding of the art supplies that focused only on the most lurid of colours. It’s full of energy-drink greens and cocktail pinks. It loves oranges and purples, and most of all it loves layers. There’s the black outline of the Sarcophagus itself, craggy and mine-like at one moment, erupting into art nouveau railings and Mucha stained-windows the next. On top of that, though, there’s life spilling out, taking over, very much in all environments. A corridor may be a grotto because glowing mushrooms have worked their way between statues of praying figures. Elsewhere, giant space zits wait to rupture above carpets of swaying Lucozade corn. At first I thought I was walking through a King Crimson cover, but in truth there’s something of 1980s indie comics at work here. The art team is lead by Niklas “El Huervo” Akerblad, best known perhaps for Hotline Miami. It makes exploration, just being in this world, intoxicating before you’ve even done anything here. (It works beautifully with the dreamy, doomy audio, too, by Oscar “Ratvader” Rydelius.)