Extremely impressed by Ultros
I sunk some hours into Ultros last week and it pretty much knocked my socks off.
At the start, it appears to be a fairly ordinary Metroidvania with extremely strong art. Stick with it long enough, however, and you'll start to see it break all sorts of Metroidvania rules.
The map isn't particularly big, for one. And the game "restarts" you periodically throughout your playtime. You'll get teleported back to the start, and your skills will be wiped - unless you've found some hidden items which can "pin" skills on the (fairly small) skill tree.
It became clear to me pretty quickly that restarting wasn't taking away my progress - it was banking progress. Real progress in Ultros has very little to do with the character state, and much more to do with the way you've altered the game world. Don't read any further if you'd like to go into this game completely blind.
Basically, every restart, or "cycle," advances time in the game world while you sleep. This time progresses the growth cycles of various plants, animals, and compost processes. By the time I hit cycle 3, I was starting to realize that my new abilities made killing enemies pretty pointless. My new priorities were all about growing plants and feeding their fruit to animals, who, in turn, would create more planting spots for me all over the game.
From there I unlocked more abilities which changed my focus yet again. The plants are just the first layer of weirdness in Ultros - once you get enough of them spread around, you start strategizing about which plants to use to solve various traversal puzzles, and which plants to use as a kind of scaffolding for the real weirdness - a kind of plant internet network you start to spread all over the game map.
Right now I kill only one or two enemies a cycle, and only if I have to. I completed two major gameplay objectives without killing anyone at all. I found a nonviolent way to kill a miniboss. I'm singularly focused on this goddamn plant internet, and everything I've learned ladders up into it. Dodge enemies, feed them fruit, plant more plants, eat the fruit, find hidden areas, pin more skills, plant more plants, and get the plant network into weirder and weirder spots. I look back on my first hour with the game, when I was trying to get good at combos, and it feels like a completely different game.
I'm about... two thirds? of the way through, I think. I'm really enjoying it, and I'm a huge fan of how weird and tricky it is. And it looks incredible!
A warning, however - there have been a couple times during my experience where I got so stuck that I had to look something up. It takes a really long time to start thinking about the environment in the way the game wants you to - there are also a lot of moments where the game seems as if it's soft-locked you. I think I've searched for three different potential soft-locks so far. None of them, really, were soft-locks - I was just stuck in a spot so baffling that I could not see what I was supposed to do with the plants to get myself out. Each time, there was some interaction I hadn't considered which could get me to a hard-to-see exit. I'm liking this game a lot, but I've worked myself into a spot of pretty intense frustration about once every two and a half hours.
That said, the posts I've found online about my soft locks are generally polite enough to try and avoid totally spoilering me. The people chatting about this game online seem particularly polite, that way. (The names for things in this game are also so strange and obscure that they don't spoil very much.)
I hope that I'll have the gumption to make this one of the few games per year that I get completionist on. It's really something!!