Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, the debut release from Metamorphosis Games, takes players on a captivating journey through a beautifully realised steampunk world. As a Metroidvania adventure, it offers a richly detailed retro pixel art style and a pulsating soundtrack that perfectly complements its atmospheric setting. While the game’s ambitious design and engaging gameplay loop show a lot of promise, it doesn’t quite reach the heights it aspires to.
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A Story Clouded in Steam
A calamity struck the world of Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, resulting in daemons pouring out of an abyssal gate. To fight these nightmarish creatures, the last remnants of humanity relied on a warrior race known as the Akhanians to fight the daemons using the power of the abyss infused into steam powered armour.
However, this power proved too much and those who donned the armours became corrupted. All except one, the Chrome Knight, who defeated the corrupted armours and saved humanity. Humanity raised a great steam city, Canaan, as a safe haven from the ruined world, after exiling the remaining Akhanians.
The premise for an enjoyable story is there, unfortunately, Gestalt never utilises this backstory to any great effect, instead opting to tease and allude throughout the game’s short seven-hour playtime.
Set centuries later, the game has you play as Aletheia, a Soldner (mercenary) who takes on a seemingly regular job that results in her needing to find out more about her past.
Despite her past being rooted in the world’s history, Aletheia never felt like more than just a merc with a sword, a gun and some flashy moves. Even though the inhabitants of the world treat her as so much more.
The story never quite felt like it knew where it wanted to go, opting for setups over conclusions and putting all its eggs in the basket of a potential sequel; the ending was particularly disappointing.
The story is experienced through all too frequent and long-winded lore dumps as characters converse. I wish the developers had opted to include more cutscenes over conversations; often riddled with typos and missing words, the conversations were, at times, hard to follow.
Fusion of Pixel Perfection and a Steamy Score
Luckily, the game beautifully realises its world through pixelated graphics and is accompanied by a bombastic musical score, which makes up for the story and those awful conversations.
The animators meticulously crafted Aletheia, showcasing attention to detail in the bounce of her broad-brimmed hat and her flowing, fiery red hair trailing in the wind as she sprints; the love and care put into her character is evident.
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Other characters are all treated with the same care, cogs turn and steam flows from clockwork machines and saliva drips from the jaws of alien plant life.
Aletheia’s companions all have their own little animated quirks that add to their personalities. Showing that you don’t need state of the art graphics to add minute details to characters.
I never found myself getting tired of exploring the world either, as the variety on offer was excellent. Aletheia moves through dusty vaults, city streets, and hidden tunnels to massive molten furnaces and dense alien forests.
Each locale offers secrets to explore and valuables to find and is scored to perfection, expanding on the ambiance and variation between each area.
My favourite by far was the perilous Scrap Sea, with its steampunk EDM vibe. It had a rhythmic ticking accompanied by vibrating metals, deep bass and a violin that slowly built to a dirty drop.
You can grab the OST on Steam if you’re keen.
Gameplay Doesn’t Fire on all Cylinders
The gameplay for Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is a rather straightforward affair; Aletheia is given a quest, a location and you head there, that about sums it up! Along the way, there are characters to talk to, who often don’t add much to the gameplay. Side quests were few and far between and when they did pop up they were always just ‘kill x number of bad guys’ and fetch quests.
There is a bounty board system for each new area – what’s a Soldner without bounties right? Luckily for Aletheia, every single bounty is also just a ‘kill x number of bad guys’ and could easily be done by just continuing through the area.
I never found any of these quests compelling or challenging in any way and often just spam grabbed them each time and then would just hand them in at the next bounty board I came across.
Outside of the combat, the main gameplay loop consists of ‘head right’ most of the time. Apart from a couple of instances I never had to do more than that, which is a shame.
Never Got Burned
The combat, which makes up the bulk of your time, is smooth and fluid but not very deep. All the standard movement options to traverse and avoid enemies are present, double jumps, dashes, air dashes and backsteps.
Aletheia can attack enemies with her sword using light attacks and powerful heavy attacks. Heavy attacks require bullets to perform, for some reason, so are limited in use.
You unlock several different attacks as you level, each being performed using a different directional input. Speaking of bullets, Aletheia’s gun can only hold a couple and they must be earned by attacking enemies – which was never overly difficult.
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The gun can be used to ‘break’ enemies with a tesla shot, leaving them dazed for high damage, which was useful primarily against bosses and shielded foes — or Aletheia can just simply fire the gun for damage.
As you level the gun up, it is basically able to one shot any enemy (aside from bosses).
Whilst this made the game incredibly easy the higher your level got, it was rather satisfying just steamrolling enemies. The fluid and fast combat was enjoyable, however the lack of any real challenge was a shame.
The first hour of the game was the only time I felt any real sense of danger. I only died once in my playtime, and that was just to see what happened. Bosses, while offering a nice variety, never provided much of a challenge.
Maybe I’ve just been playing too many Soulslikes lately… who knows?
Leave no Dog Behind!
My favourite feature within Gestalt: Steam & Cinder was collecting Corgis. That’s right, Corgis — the best collectible in any videogame ever. EVER!
Each area had a new Corgi friend to find and send back to town for rewards. Who doesn’t love Corgis?
Again this wasn’t a particularly challenging task, but hearing their bark always brought a smile to my face and forced me to track down my furry friends.
Just Needs More Pressure Cooking
Even with its flawed storytelling and casual gameplay, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder was still an enjoyable time overall. The combat, while simplistic, was effective and the art direction and soundtrack were top tier.
I only wish the game took a little more time to flesh out its story with cutscenes and added difficulty modes for those who wanted a greater challenge.
Lately, we have seen some extremely well polished Metroidvanias, such as Nine Sols and Blasphemous 2. Both of these are around the same price and offer upwards of 30 hours game time.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, with its $29.50 AUD asking price for seven/eight hours of gameplay, just doesn’t feel like value for money in comparison.
There is certainly a solid foundation here for a great video game series and I do hope the developers get their shot to improve upon the formula with the sequel they clearly desire.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is available now on PC via Steam
Quest Daily Score Gestalt: Steam & Cinder
6.5/10
Quest Daily was supplied a copy of Gestalt: Steam & Cinder for the purpose of this review.
