I found Ultros through Skillup's weekly news video, where in the "Put this on your radar" segment he talked about playing its demo. It's a metroidvania with so called "psychedelics visuals." The vibrant art style got me interested and he said that the demo was a lot of fun. When looking into this game that word "psychedelic" was repeated over and over, which did set of a bit of a red flag since that was about the most anyone said. When the full game released I got it on steam, and enjoyed the first hour or so same as I expected. However from there my enjoyment really went downhill. At some point I remember thinking "This game's shortcomings remind me of Scorn" and sure enough when I checked, it was the same publisher (different studio though). Unlike scorn however, I don't really recommend Ultros.
The great stuff in Ultros really starts and ends with the pretty visuals. It is far too easy to feel confused, lost, and like you are doing something wrong. Like scorn, Ultros seems to not understand some of the "Language of videogames." Most issues seem like they could be fixed with a little playtesting and feedback. There are a lot of times you'll be running back and forth constantly opening the map with no clue as to what you should be doing. The exploration aspects started to frustrate after the first hour, that frustration only got worse as time went on. Combat felt too janky to pull off a smooth kill, but other people may take to it better than I did. The story and characters are boringly shallow, never giving enough info to push the story beyond "look at all this pretty stuff, is the music convincing you this is impactful?"
Very Minor Spoilers Below
The time loop angle is questionable, I don't feel like it ever improved the game and only was an annoyance to make you re-earn skills and gear. I didn't click with the gardening mechanics, usually only planting when necessary to make progress. I really don't get what they were going for with it, usually you have the correct seed on you to do any task and seeds are just sort of spread out on the map randomly so it didn't change the way I played. And I literally never had to feed a monster to make a planting location. I got early on that they wanted to do a "You are the bad guy for killing all these bugs" angle but it failed miserably. There is a weird lack of emotion to everything this game says. Once I got to the bad ending the gardener guy said that it's okay to leave and there really isn't any more for you to do. I was so relieved that I could stop there, and just watched the other ending on YouTube. If you like the visuals enough maybe this is worth a try for you, but I won't be recommending it to anyone which is pretty rare for me.
The great stuff in Ultros really starts and ends with the pretty visuals. It is far too easy to feel confused, lost, and like you are doing something wrong. Like scorn, Ultros seems to not understand some of the "Language of videogames." Most issues seem like they could be fixed with a little playtesting and feedback. There are a lot of times you'll be running back and forth constantly opening the map with no clue as to what you should be doing. The exploration aspects started to frustrate after the first hour, that frustration only got worse as time went on. Combat felt too janky to pull off a smooth kill, but other people may take to it better than I did. The story and characters are boringly shallow, never giving enough info to push the story beyond "look at all this pretty stuff, is the music convincing you this is impactful?"
Very Minor Spoilers Below
The time loop angle is questionable, I don't feel like it ever improved the game and only was an annoyance to make you re-earn skills and gear. I didn't click with the gardening mechanics, usually only planting when necessary to make progress. I really don't get what they were going for with it, usually you have the correct seed on you to do any task and seeds are just sort of spread out on the map randomly so it didn't change the way I played. And I literally never had to feed a monster to make a planting location. I got early on that they wanted to do a "You are the bad guy for killing all these bugs" angle but it failed miserably. There is a weird lack of emotion to everything this game says. Once I got to the bad ending the gardener guy said that it's okay to leave and there really isn't any more for you to do. I was so relieved that I could stop there, and just watched the other ending on YouTube. If you like the visuals enough maybe this is worth a try for you, but I won't be recommending it to anyone which is pretty rare for me.