Gestalt: Steam & Cinder – the 16-bit beauty of Metroidvania

On the Metroidvania sliding scale, Gestalt leans far more towards Castlevania than Metroid, with its gothic visuals and role-playing stats. It casts you as Aletheia, a mysterious fighter living on the steampunk world of Canaan, where a mystical rift opened generations earlier, spawning a generation of technologically enhanced superfighters who plunged the land into civil war.

A fragile peace now reigns, but Aletheia sets out to uncover Canaan’s dark secret, shooting and stabbing as many robots and monsters as she can. While the influences are clear, the world of Gestalt: Steam & Cinder has more narrative depth than you might expect from a Metroidvania, with plenty of plot twists and character betrayals.

In classic Metroidvania style, Aletheia acquires useful abilities as she progresses through the game and levels up. Gestalt has a massive abilities tree, bringing the expected upgrades to health, weapon, and melee damage, along with a variety of increasingly powerful blade attacks and the ability for her energy-powered weapon to fire more shots than the single one it started with. She’ll also earn crucial new abilities by defeating bosses, including a double jump, air dash, and a heavy attack.

As you might expect, the new abilities open up previously inaccessible parts of the map, while Aletheia can pick up documents that populate the map with treasure locations, bringing the armorer and gunsmith in her hometown of Irkalla into the picture.

At first, even basic (mostly robotic) enemies are a challenge thanks to Aletheia’s limited health, but she quickly develops into a powerful fighter, with an increased amount of health-restoring draughts. That’s a good thing, because her enemies get even harder after that. Every time you leave and re-enter a room on the map, enemies respawn, which feels a little unfair at first but becomes useful later on, as you can use them as a way to grind and level up faster.

You’ll need to grind at times, as the bosses are – again, in classic Metroidvania style – quite difficult. They’re also impressively diverse, but they all have one thing in common: patience is required to defeat them. Like Elden Ring et al., knowing when to go on the offensive and when to dodge their instant-kill attacks, while learning their patterns and vulnerabilities, is vital.

The further you progress through Gestalt, the more inventive the levels become: you’ll eventually encounter a number of sequences that feel very reminiscent of the Metroid games, in that in addition to battling enemies, you’ll also have to solve satisfyingly complex mechanical puzzles. There’s also a speed level in which you’ll have to perform a near-flawless platforming sequence while being attacked by a rogue’s gallery of enemies and a rapidly rising lava flow.

For an indie game, Metroidvania or not, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder feels extremely polished and polished. It contains 15-20 hours of gameplay, adorned with great music (suitably baroque, atmospheric and memorable) and fantastic pixel art graphics. There’s some fantastic animation and pleasingly imaginative design, in what is an example of just how far you can push hand-drawn 16-bit graphics using modern technology.

In gameplay terms, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder may not do anything particularly original, but in terms of presentation and slickness it’s one of the best Metroidvanias, indie or otherwise. It still doesn’t point to a future evolution of the genre, whose design has remained largely static for decades, but when a game looks and plays this good, that hardly seems to matter.

Formats: PC (reviewed) and Nintendo Switch
Price: TBA
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Developer: Metamorphosis Games
Release Date: July 16, 2024 (Switch TBC)
Age Rating: 7