Aletheia, the premier mercenary in the city of Canaan, feels like a fireball made flesh. Depicted in exquisite pixel art, the protagonist of Metamorphosis Games’s Gestalt: Steam & Cinder tears robots, bandits, and mutants apart with a flaming blade and a revolver, her crimson hair flashing against her drab-brown duster with every slice and shot.
As you guide Aletheia through side-scrolling gauntlets of foes and perilous terrain, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s graceful animation and combat can regularly drive you into an almost meditative state of flow. But for all its sensory and mechanical delights, the game seems intent on snapping you out of the zone, namely with its undercooked but intrusive narrative and its halfhearted deference to the trappings of the Metroidvania genre.
A gorgeous opening cutscene introduces an intriguing steampunk setting, detailing a war won by legendary knights who donned armor fitted with cogs and vapor-channeling tubes. But the story fumbles forward from there, grinding the action to frequent halts with stilted and wordy dialogue, a deluge of mystifying proper nouns, thinly sketched characters, and predictable plotting. Suffice it to say that Aletheia comes to play a central role in ancient prophecies and the fate of the world. (The yarn’s biggest surprise is how abruptly it ends.)
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s exploration certainly provides greater thrills than its exposition, as Aletheia navigates underground vaults and labs, rain-soaked wastelands, and other vibrant environments that interconnect with a series of shortcuts. Along the way, slaying foes and completing side quests nets you experience that you can invest in a skill tree to gain passive boosts and active attacks. Pity, then, that there’s minimal room for player expression in builds, as you can easily score all of Aletheia’s upgrades by the game’s conclusion. Likewise, while it’s fun to tinker with the various accessories that customize Aletheia’s strengths and weaknesses, the simplicity of bosses minimizes the satisfaction of finding the right loadout for the job.
Aletheia also gradually attains a suite of powers that allow you to reach previously inaccessible areas, but backtracking grows tedious due to the barebones map and the limitations of fast travel. You can only teleport to and from a handful of locations, meaning that you often need to embark on odysseys to use warp spots to get elsewhere. This tedium leads the game’s Metroidvania elements to feel shoehorned in rather than integral to its design. Though it has the bones of a winning action platformer, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder contorts them in submission to generic norms and expectations. The adventure becomes a chore, the fire stamped out.
This game was reviewed with code provided by 71 Consulting.
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