Indie Game of the Week 428: Ultros

Last week's Mouthwashing only gestured towards the involvement of mind-melting cosmic horror, so let's take a big ol' bong rip of the real thing here with the trippy sci-fi exploraction game Ultros from Swedish development team Hadoque. In Ultros, you awake as a nameless warrior from a damaged stasis pod in a spacefaring vessel that appears to have completely given over to nature. From a small amount of probing you discover that the craft you're on is one built to accommodate the gestating seed of the as-yet-unborn titular godlike entity Ultros (whom I don't believe is an octopus, but tentacles do appear to be a factor). By wandering around and killing what are called shamans, humanoid figures in deep stasis who are mentally projecting energy, you disrupt the sleep of Ultros to the despair of a second being much like yourself who seems adamant that she should be one to eventually awake Ultros and not before she's ready. After slaying your first shaman and meeting this enigmatic guardian you are tossed back in time to the very start of the game, absent all the items and upgrades you'd procured up until that point.

Ultros can be described as almost antagonistically obtuse at first, as you're given very little information beyond how to play the game and how to fight monsters—the combat system is fairly robust and rewards versatility, as I'll get into—on your first "loop". Successive loops not only open new areas to explore, even in spite of how it resets your progress, but explain more of what's going on and how you're actually meant to approach the game. It's the type of playthrough where you need to go along with the flow with some degree of faith because you're not going to have any firm idea of what is expected of you for a while and you mostly just muddle through whichever route is presently available. In that sense it's not too dissimilar to other exploraction games that typically present a number of branching paths but cut you off from all but a few until you come back later with the right upgrades, and in this case there's a definite if subtle funneling effect as you end up visiting places in unexpected ways. An example would be how your upgrades are kept in an "extractor"—used to siphon the psychic energies of shaman after their deaths, which in turn become abilities (or "programs") that you can use—and most loops start with you backtracking to the central hub area where your extractor can be collected again, returning to you your suite of upgrades including useful progress-enabling tools like a double-jump and a means to fly for a short while whenever you touch water. However, in one loop you lack an opportunity to go fetch your extractor and must pass through a new area without it at first, only to come back in the next loop with your extractor in tow where you can then explore more of it.

Combat is loosely of that Soulsian model that emphasizes caution and quick reflexes, though stamina isn't really a factor here. You can speedily get behind enemies as they attack with a dodge roll which then sets them up for a riposte, or you can use a combination of mid-air attacks, combination attacks, or charge attacks to damage enemies between their attack windows. Enemies drop meat after their defeat, which not only replenishes your health but adds a form of experience points to the game's upgrade system: the quality of this meat depends on the variety of the moves used to slay the creature it belonged to. The ideal scenario is that you defeat enemies with a combination of different attack types that are only used once apiece: this gets you a "prime" cut. You might end up with a "battered" cut which has far less nutritional value or, worst of all, a piece of bloody pulp with very little to offer. This encourages you early on to mix up your attack types and acquire new ones to add to your repertoire via the upgrade system, including dive-kicks, flying kicks, juggles, ground-pounds, and various others.

Ultros's themes take a while to emerge but they essentially boil down a pro-environmental message of peaceful cooperation with your surroundings (when possible) as well as an Undertale-like treatise on the Prisoner's Dilemma where violence and betrayal are less profitable in the long run than coexistence and mutually beneficial arrangements. On the first few loops you're tearing through the beasts that occupy the halls with a combination of attacks at your disposal, many of which need to be unlocked from the skill tree and thus seem all the more pivotal as you work towards unlocking them, but later loops conversely seem to discourage engaging with these alien creatures at all and instead pick more roundabout routes to avoid them or else placate them by feeding them the fruit you find. Both the meat you earn from fighting monsters and the fruit you can acquire from plants that you may or may not have planted will contribute to the game's upgrade system, increasing one of four nutrition gauges that can be exchanged for upgrades at specific amounts, so strictly speaking you only really need one or the other. Careful exploration of dead ends and the like unlock "mnemonic mycelium", which can be used to "lock" upgrades so they persist across loops; after the first loop's devastating total reset this does restore a little bit of faith when it comes to engaging in that side of the game (though, as I intimated above, you'll probably find yourself prioritizing utility upgrades like health or map icons over those additional attack types as combat becomes all the more disincentivized).

I'm some seven or eight hours into Ultros yet I'm still learning new things about it, such as the enigmatic "living network" that can be used to attach the game's stasis pods (save points) together for easier fast-travel. I suspect there are more benefits to it than that though, and all the lessons I've been taught about sowing seeds and fostering new plant growth is no doubt going to contribute to getting this entire organic space station fully hooked up to this network. I've found enough mnemonic mycelium to keep my preferred upgrades safe that I barely feel the sense of progress loss that tends to follow every new loop yet there's still a pervasive sentiment that I'm being lead around by the nose with each reset rather than having my full run of the place. Ultros's presentation is a striking point in its favor for the most part, though all that psychedelic business happening in the background can occasionally hide more important details to the player's detriment, and the soft orchestral music does as much to accentuate the eerie beauty of the game's space-arboreal setting as it does to unnerve you whenever the unknowably eldritch Ultros stirs due to your meddling and another layer of obfuscation is peeled away. Though I felt slightly frustrated by how I was fighting for every morsel of direction or understanding early on, the slow process of figuring out how this game ticks has proven somewhat rewarding. I'm sure there's more I still need to learn about cosmic horticulture and living alongside nature rather than exploiting it for my own benefit, but with these constant loops I suppose I have all the time I need to do so (well, in-game at least; it might be a different story out here in boring old linear timeline reality). Ultimately, what works best here is how Ultros is completely unlike most other exploraction games I've played—barring perhaps the similarly extraterrestrial botanically-inclined Waking Mars—and after covering so many of these map-and-double-jump doodads novelty can be a big tick in the pros column.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)