How psychedelic gardenvania Ultros would have you "talk" to the aliens

rockpapershotgun.com:

When playing any character-driven videogame I sometimes experience a sensation akin to my eyes unfocussing, and remember that I'm not, strictly speaking, controlling a body in a world, but interacting with a simulation that includes representations of a body and a world. The character is just an interfacial node in a vast tangle of visible and invisible elements; by moving the character, I cause objects, surfaces, creatures to load or unload, spring into motion or change colour and a million things besides.

Some games foreground these interdependencies by fictionalising the simulation as a giant organism or ecosystem, a more intriguing kind of "living, breathing" environment which is aware of your presence within it. Amongst these games is Ultros, a side-scrolling, psychedelic metroidvania - or as developers Hadoque might prefer, "gardenvania" - which launches next week.

In Ultros, you explore a huge, verdant, space-going Sarcophagus that exists to contain an ancient, demonic being, but is also a "cosmic uterus" for various other species (one of the developers became a father during its creation, and that experience is writ large in the premise). It's a place of violence but also of nurturing, with players 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 who also worked on Bestest Best adventure Else Heart.Break(). The Sarcophagus is probably his magnum opus, an enveloping greenhouse of stalks and fronds and fleshy mechanisms which, as it were, turns Åkerblad and Hadoque's desire for a nicely joined-up gameworld into a question of anatomy.

Åkerblad looks for this kind of 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