After months of teasers from lead developer Arsi «Hakita» Patala, early access boomer shooter Ultrakill has gotten a complete visual overhaul of nearly every level, with the lone exception being the newest batch, 2023's four-level layer of Violence.
Patala first previewed the visual revamp last May with a walkthrough of the gussied-up new look for level 1-1 Heart of the Sunrise. «While our programmers are busy with major rewrites that will take a long time, me and [3D artist Victoria Holland] are doing a visual pass on the old levels to get them up to par with the later ones,» Patala wrote in the description of the first showcase. «There will likely be some functional changes here and there, but the general geometry, layouts, and encounters will remain the same in almost all cases since they work fine as is.» In some of the areas, particularly Limbo, the changes might be more difficult to clock, but it's in an «as you remember it» kind of way—New Blood quips that «this will be Ultrakill grafix in 1999,» so maybe think of the original art as more '97 to '98.
A comparison video from New Blood helps illustrate the extent of the changes in some of the more subtly retouched areas. I think my favorite is the overhauled skybox introduced to layer 2, Lust.
The lore is that the humans of hell actually banded together to turn Lust into a quite lovely metropolis under the rule of wise and colossal King Minos.
I think the city's been going downhill since the DIY hardcore scene petered out and it started getting Sweetgreens, but it definitely died when the angels of heaven intervened to punish mankind and enslave King Minos.