Mastema: Out of Hell

I want to root for Mastema: Out of Hell. Genuinely. Solo developer Oscar Celestini built this from the bones of his childhood, Mega Drive cartridges, C64 tapes, arcade marquees glowing in darkened rooms, and that love radiates off every sprite frame. The opening moments hit with a real charge: chunky 16-bit spritework, a CRT filter toggle right up front, and a chiptune soundtrack with a warm SNES-and-C64 grain that composer Gianluca Pappalardo clearly cared about. As a mood piece and a visual statement, it lands. This is handcrafted pixel art from someone who also works as a comic illustrator, and it shows in the expressive enemy designs and hellish background detail across the game's 20 locations. The structure is a classic linear action-platformer: run, jump, collect a flaming weapon dropped from a clash between an angel and a demon, then fight your way through more than 55 levels across 20 locations, facing eight end-level bosses and one final confrontation with Mastema itself. The premise, a lost soul with no memory trying to claw out of hell, is thin by design, a vessel for moment-to-moment platforming rather than storytelling. That's fine. The problem is that the moment-to-moment platforming is where things unravel. The jump arc is the core wound. Players and critics alike have flagged it since launch, and years later it remains unfixed: the character's leap feels slightly too short, the arc slightly too stiff, landing on narrow platforms over death pits a dice roll as much as a skill check. Dissolving platforms appear in the second stage of the very first area. When you die on a stage that drops no collectible weapon, you restart it unarmed, forced to dodge past enemies rather than fight them, which compounds the frustration. The menu defaults in a way that makes accidentally selecting New Game over Continue an easy mistake after a death. None of these are fatal on their own, old-school platformers carried sins like these routinely, but stacked together they tip the difficulty from satisfying to grinding. The Steam community sits at a split "Mixed" verdict for a reason. And yet. The soundtrack genuinely deserves better company than the control issues surrounding it. The visual atmosphere in the deeper hell locations earns its mood. Celestini rebuilt the entire engine once already, scrapping a higher-resolution version over collision bugs and movement problems, which means the shipped game is the improved version, a sobering thought, but also a sign of someone who cares enough to start over. For players who grew up mainlining Ghosts 'n Goblins and consider punishment a feature rather than a flaw, there is something real here to appreciate. For everyone else, the gap between what Mastema aspires to be and what it currently plays like is wide enough to fall through.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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