Overlooked Metroidvania Ultros is the anti-Silksong, which makes it the perfect follow-up to Team Cherry's epic

Whether you've rattled off the Hollow Knight Silksong 100% and are still finding excuses to explore Team Cherry's masterpiece (guilty as charged), or bounced off its demanding action and hostile world, you're probably looking for your next Metroidvania. You could opt for a newcomer like MIO: Memories in Orbit, or established staples such as Bloodstained, Rain World, or Nine Sols. But I'm going to recommend Ultros, which handles the genre in a unique manner that took me a little while to warm to, only to grow into an experience I'll treasure for many years to come.

The first thing you'll notice about Ultros is its vibrant, psychedelic color scheme. It's almost too much, and nearly kept me from playing it at all, worried I wouldn't be able to pick my character and the enemies out from the bright backgrounds. In practice, that's not an issue, and it looks phenomenal in motion. Trapped on a ship known as the Sarcophagus, which has been overrun by plant life and aliens of numerous types, you're tasked with ensuring that a Lovecraftian demon incarcerated in its walls, the eponymous Ultros, isn't allowed to awaken.

Swedish developer Hadoque throws the typical Metroidvania progression out of the window from the start. Initially, you're thrust back to the very beginning after each successful objective, then pushed in a different direction towards your next goal. While it has a handful of traditional upgrades, most of the tools you unlock are ways to interact with the plant life spread across the Sarcophagus. Each of these grows in unique and (usually) useful ways, and by planting and fostering them in specific spots, you're able to gradually mold the ship to open up new routes of traversal.

The Ogu Mumin sprouts broad, rigid canopies that act as platforms you can stand on to reach higher areas. Sprogen spreads a carpet of golden grass that speeds up your movement; grow it up a wall and you can run all the way along it to the top. The Augeas spurts out an unsettling red liquid that flows across the world and causes growths to appear whenever it reaches an overhang. Mushishi slides along walls and ceilings, draping vines that you can swing across.

Progression in Silksong forces you to confront an increasingly broken and punishing Pharloom, the very infrastructure at times crumbling away around you. Ultros is the polar opposite, each turn of the wheel allowing you to rejuvenate and expand the ecosystem. I don't want to give away the exact interactions between you, the plants, and the numerous creatures found aboard the Sarcophagus, but the result is that Ultros is a game that feels cozier and less stressful the further you move forward. That's not how videogame progression is supposed to work, but it's tremendously rewarding. It's not about where you go next, but how you get there, and why you want to do it.

If I've already sold you on Ultros, you need read no further; you can download a demo on Steam should you wish to put hands on it before you plonk your cash down. Otherwise, permit me some considered (and hopefully light) spoilers. At first, during those early 'time loops', Ultros remains fundamentally traditional, with you hacking apart the creatures you encounter in order to move forward. Once you've experienced the basics of each different skill, you stop losing your gear between runs, and the 'real game' gets underway.

Gradually, you begin to figure out that, by feeding some aliens certain fruits (or the innards of other beasties), you can start to influence their behavior, and even temporarily warm them to your presence. It goes even deeper. As one example, leaving specific creatures alive and fed will cause them to 'create' fresh patches of fertile soil that you can plant in (I'll leave it up to you to imagine the specifics of how this happens). This lets you cultivate certain species in new areas, and thus benefit from their unique effects.

By its final act, Ultros is near-unrecognizable from the game it starts as. Combat is almost entirely forgotten, and you're working to boost the composition of the soil in given areas so that they can support bigger, stronger plants. Eventually, you're digging underground to reshape root networks, and performing genetic splicing to fuse multiple different species together and combine their traits. Coax the vine-like Ubarba to great lengths, then slap an Ogu Mumin bud onto it for a handy platform.

It's all in service of a greater whole, naturally, but I'll leave it up to you to discover exactly what that is. Ultros is quite unlike any other Metroidvania I've played, and even going in with some idea of what to expect in the latter half I was still rather astounded by how it played out, and by just how much I enjoyed it. If you're craving something a little different, and are willing to put in a little time to see where it goes (my total count came in just shy of 30 hours), Ultros gets a resounding recommendation from me.