Video game action-platformers might have had their golden age in the 1980s and 90s with Metroid and Contra, but the genre’s modern resurgence has given us exceptional games such as Dead Cells and Hollow Knight, showing that bone-crunching combat and pin-point platforming still work beautifully together. But how do you breathe new life into this familiar video game form? In the case of Ultros, you complement the usual thrills and spills, with a spot of gardening – an opportunity to slow down and smell the roses.
Game design director Mårten Brüggemann says the gardening isn’t just about growing resources (although that’s a useful outcome of getting your hands dirty), but deepening your relationship with the game’s teeming, nature-filled world. “You can plant as much as you want, evolving the plants and shaping them in different ways to make hybrids,” he says. “We want to give life to an ecosystem.”
Intriguingly, your allotment in Ultros is located on a giant sarcophagus floating through the outer reaches of the cosmos. This is where the protagonist, Ouji, wakes up having crashed her ship, and has to grapple with a black hole that keeps her trapped in an eternal time loop. Exploring this alien setting, Ouji comes across former inhabitants and the ruins of their culture. Unlike the abandoned space stations of movies such as Alien and Event Horizon, Brüggemann describes it as an “overgrown place”, one where technology and biology have become “intertwined”.
This sci-fi world looks like an acid-dipped gig poster from the 1960s. The psychedelic artwork is by renowned artist El Huervo (who also created illustrations for the Hotline Miami series), drawing inspiration from Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki, Swedish illustrator Per Åhlin, and the plant illustrations of 19th century biologist and artist, Ernst Haeckel. Brüggemann describes a symbiosis between the hallucinatory visuals and themes of the game: in Ultros, it may be hard to distinguish between the real and imaginary.
This consciousness-expanding vibe wasn’t born from a night on ’shrooms but something a little more wholesome: the birth of his first child. “I had a lot of thoughts around parenthood, nurturing, and taking responsibility for something other than yourself,” he says. This isn’t a “dad game” in the vein of The Last of Us or God of War: “It’s on more of a philosophical plane,” Brüggemann says. “We talked a lot about the choice that the player makes: combat v gardening. It’s up to them to decide what sort of player they want to be.”
For those who lean towards fast-paced action, Ultros’s duels should pack the required punch. The designer describes encounters in the game as a “dance of death”, the camera pulling in tight to give players a closeup view of each “urgent, weighty” clash. Konami’s cult classic Viewtiful Joe is one influence; arcade brawler Street Fighter is another. Who are you fighting? Often the alien wildlife. As Brüggemann says, Ultros can be bucolic but also nightmarish and gruesome – “just like nature itself”.
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Ultros is out in 2024 on PlayStation 4 and 5.