Indie games are known for their bold and innovative approaches to visuals and storytelling. Ultros is a new indie title coming to PS4 and PS5 on February 13th. This game is his sci-fi adventure in a twisted time loop. High-stakes action, clever twists on classic game design ideas, interesting and often unsettling environmental storytelling, and the idea that this game might have its own built-in blacklight. It’s full of crazy, colorful, pop, and psychedelic visuals that will make you laugh.
This eye-popping adventure is coming to PlayStation courtesy of Sweden-based developer Hadoque. The film follows an astronaut trapped in a nightmarish time cycle inside a strange and seemingly demonic black hole that serves as the womb of an unspeakable cosmic horror, the titular “Ultros”. It depicts the story of.
In the words of game director Morten Brüggemann, “It’s a psychedelic sci-fi platform adventure, an experience centered around combat and gardening. You’ll also explore a sarcophagus spaceship and find out what it’s a metaphor for. Diving into it raises a lot of existential questions as you try to understand what’s inside.”
Fight or grow?
Ultros is essentially an exploration action game where you explore an increasingly expansive map as you gain more abilities for navigation and combat. This is a popular indie game genre, and Ultros expands on this with a unique gameplay twist centered around the idea of the karmic cycle of creation and destruction, nurture and killing.
“This is a game about choices,” Brüggemann explains. “You can choose to play in a destructive or constructive way, and your choices change the interpretation of your in-game actions.”
This environment oozes otherworldly threats and requires skilled combat to neutralize the various hostile life forms. Diversity is valued here. Ultros encourages you to use different moves in fun and creative ways to attack your enemies. You can dodge and attack, jump attack, and even launch enemies into the air, turning them into living projectile weapons.
“We want to fight in a way that feels intimate and visceral, to emphasize destruction and destruction, and to disrupt the balance of destruction and construction within the current cycle. “Focusing on and forcing you to be close to them to fight them is essential to what we wanted to do, which is the intensity and intimacy of one-on-one combat.”
When enemies fall in front of you, they drop all sorts of edible entrails. Its quality varies depending on your special skill proficiency. Eating these scraps does more than just restore health. It provides valuable nutrients and gives you access to upgrades in your tree of skills in the save pod, enhancing your movement, combat, and navigation abilities.
But if eating mystery meat makes you feel a little sick, there’s another way to get nourished. It involves growing seeds scattered around the garden and eating the fruits of those plants. Aiding you in your gardening pursuits is the Extractor, a special device that gains various abilities throughout the game.
Plants that grow over time leave behind various benefits, such as creating platforms for changing routes and making garden planning and care an important part of gameplay. Brüggemann elaborates: “Seeds all have different abilities and rules for growing. Part of starting your garden is learning how these different plants work and how they interact with each other and their surroundings. It’s about knowing how to impact the world.”
Mr. Brüggemann continues. “With these in-game resources, you can eat everything you find and accumulate nutrients, much like the experience point system. But it’s also an economy of how the game’s ecosystem works. When you harvest something from a plant, you are, in a sense, stealing from it. However, you can give back by planting seeds. When you kill, you take away both the creature’s life and the ecosystem. We wanted to give you the option in the game to not be that hero.”
Oh yeah, there’s another important element to the garden. Even when the time loop erases everything and returns us to square one, the garden remains.
Let’s time warp again
Yes, Ultros is a game built around time loops, and there’s only so much you can do before you have to start anew. I may have been lucky to retain some of the skills I gained in the previous loop. But more importantly, I have the knowledge I gained from my previous attempt. So what plants did you take care of? You might be surprised to see what they turn out to be.
“One of the core concepts we built this game around is the philosophy of the karmic cycle: what you do in one life shapes the next. , there is a time loop mechanic that allows characters and worlds to be reborn. Therefore, one of the major choices you can make in the game is whether or not to grow the world you are in. Once you build it, your garden will grow as you grow. You become part of the world you live in and take care of these plants. That’s how the game world evolves.”
The existence of player choices within these time cycles suggests multiple conclusions to Ultros’ story. When I asked Brüggemann about it, he said: The Time He Loop is more story-driven than mechanics-driven, allowing you to explore “what if I did this instead” scenarios, which also ties into the philosophy of the Karma He Cycle. We want players to relive events and scenarios while seeing them from a different perspective. You will be given the opportunity to choose again from a different perspective. ”
A swirling universe of colors
The game’s trademark art style is by art designer El Huervo, known for his work on the classic indie series Hotline Miami. The visuals are packed with contrast, both in color and theme. In one area you’ll be surrounded by an environment filled with slimy, pulsating, visceral growths, but a short distance away you’ll discover the following: It is no different from the elegant cathedrals of Europe.
“The art style of Ultros can be described as a combination of Renaissance painting, comics, and Jackson Pollock,” says Brueggemann. “El Huerbo’s style has developed over the years. He is heavily influenced not only by the French artist Möbius, but also by the German zoologist and artist Ernst Haeckel.”
Visuals also have a huge impact on the story and atmosphere. “As you explore during the game, you will find out what the sarcophagus was used for and what happened to it afterwards. Who its first inhabitants were and how it relates to the darkness that is trapped there. will try to understand.”
You’re ready for a visually stunning adventure with intense combat, plenty of exploration, environmentally conscious world-building, and a time loop that challenges the way you approach action-adventure games. In that case, let’s step inside the sarcophagus. Ultros will debut on February 13th.