Exploring the Cohesive and Conscious World of Ultros: A Psychedelic Metroidvania

In the realm of character-driven videogames, there exists a peculiar sensation that can be likened to the eyes unfocusing, a reminder that we are not truly controlling a body in a world, but rather interacting with a simulation. The character serves as an interfacial node, causing objects, surfaces, and creatures to load or unload, spring into motion, or change color and a myriad of other things. Some games, however, foreground these interdependencies by fictionalizing the simulation as a giant organism or ecosystem, a more intriguing kind of “living, breathing” environment that is aware of our presence within it. Among these games is Ultros, a side-scrolling, psychedelic metroidvania developed by Hadoque.

Ultros is set in a colossal, verdant, space-going Sarcophagus that exists to contain an ancient, demonic being but also functions as a “cosmic uterus” for various other species. It’s a place of violence but also of nurturing, where players are given the choice of whether to tend the indigenous flora or hack a path to their objectives. The game’s environment art is the work of Niklas “El Huervo” Åkerblad, the Swedish artist and musician who devised the cover art for Hotline Miami and worked on Bestest Best adventure Else Heart.Break(). The Sarcophagus is Åkerblad’s magnum opus, an enveloping greenhouse of stalks and fronds and fleshy mechanisms that turns his desire for a nicely joined-up gameworld into a question of anatomy.

Åkerblad seeks coherence in other gameworlds. “Sonic the Hedgehog spoke to me as a kid because I felt the world was more coherent and made more sense to me than Mario, for example,” he says. “Which was maybe more fun to play, but the Mario world was like an amalgam of very different ideas, that didn’t really feel coherent to me, until I read the comics.” The Sarcophagus isn’t just cohesive; it’s saturated with the consciousness of its diabolical prisoner. Åkerblad draws a parallel with the work of Lovecraft. “The Cthulhu mythos – how that works is that Cthulhu is dreaming, but has such great psychic powers that, even if it’s almost dormant, it still invades people’s dreams, and sort of forms reality around it, without necessarily actively interacting with it,” he says. “And I feel Ultros is the same.”

In Ultros, players communicate with the hidden, sleeping presence or interpret its messages. The same goes for the smaller organisms they’ll meet, fight, or tend to along the way. “The alien life in Ultros kind of have the same thoughts and feelings as the player, but convey it in other forms than just oral communication,” Åkerblad explains. Practical instances of interspecies dialogue include negotiating with territorial insects for passage or wooing certain oversized bugs by bringing them food.

Åkerblad’s influences for the game include Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, citing Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for its depiction of a “natural world” that is both wondrous and terrifying. But in regards to the act of communicating with nonhuman life, he also points to Western filmmakers such as Spielberg. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the music and everything – I feel like, why don’t we get into that more?” he says. “I really like the way the aliens in that film communicate with us through music, because they can sort of better convey emotions that might resonate with us. And I think of the aliens in Arrival – like their language, and how language forms a culture, is very interesting. But I feel like it’s more like a visual thing, with the ‘coffee stain’ circles they’re doing. And the level of complexity in that language seems a bit unnecessary to me – to me, it feels unnecessary to have such a complex writing language.”

It’s unlikely that players will be penning letters to a demon in the game, though the world isn’t devoid of the written word. Hadoque falls back on descriptive text for elements like control inputs or dialogue with certain characters. Ultros remains an enigma. “It’s like an entity that exists on different planes to us, and thus affects its environment subconsciously,” Åkerblad goes on. “Or not even like that. It’s more like how an artist does things – like, if you paint a painting, there is an intent, but it might land very differently with the viewer, if you understand what I’m saying. So Ultros influences its environment, but you might interpret it differently.”

It’s tempting to read Åkerblad’s remark as an accidental spoiler. If he himself turns out to be the demon at the center of the Sarcophagus, a la John Romero and the Icon of Sin, you heard about it here first. Nevertheless, if Ultros piques your interest and you’re keen for a delve, there’s still time to try the demo before its launch next week. And Katharine’s full review is worth a read.

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Ultros

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

News Editor

Clapped-out Soul Reaver enthusiast with a dubious academic backstory who obsesses over dropped diary pages in horror games. Games journalist since 2008. From Yorkshire originally but sounds like he’s from Rivendell.

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