Sundered (Eldritch Edition)

Sundered (Eldritch Edition) is a metroidvania built around a simple but genuinely uncomfortable question: how much of yourself are you willing to give up for power? You play as Eshe, a wanderer who falls into a vast underground world ruled by something ancient and deeply wrong. Thunder Lotus, who you may know from the elegiac Jotun, brings that same obsessive hand-drawn artistry here, only this time the tone shifts from melancholy reverence to something closer to controlled panic. The world is split between hand-crafted zones and procedurally shuffled enemy encounters, and that combination is both Sundered's most interesting design choice and the thing most likely to frustrate you. The curated areas, boss arenas, and upgrade hubs feel intentional and memorable. The corridors between them, which can flood with dozens of enemies at once, feel deliberately overwhelming rather than finely tuned. This is not a game where combat is a puzzle to be solved cleanly. It is closer to a survival rhythm, and whether you find that exhilarating or exhausting says a lot about your tolerance for chaos over precision. The eldritch corruption system is where the writing and the mechanics actually meet. Scattered through the world are shards of dark power that you can absorb to transform Eshe's abilities in dramatic ways. Do that enough and you tip toward a corrupted ending. Resist, destroy the shards, and you get a harder run but a different outcome. This is not a binary good-versus-evil toggle. It accumulates slowly, quietly, and the game never lectures you about it. That kind of moral restraint is rarer than it should be in indie games and it earns real respect here. The Eldritch Edition adds local co-op, which changes the feel of the game considerably. The chaotic hordes become almost comedic when you have a second player sharing the screen, which is either a feature or a problem depending on how seriously you want to take the atmosphere. Solo, Sundered has a genuine dread to it, particularly in the sound design. The score is layered and strange, shifting between ambient drones and something that feels like an orchestra slowly losing its mind. That soundscape does a lot of heavy lifting in the quieter stretches, and it earns its place. Where Sundered stumbles is in its mid-game pacing. The upgrade tree is deep but some branches feel like dead ends, and without good information about which skills will matter most, early choices can leave you underpowered in ways that only become obvious much later. The death loop sends you back to a hub and lets you spend resources on permanent upgrades, which softens the frustration, but a few rough runs in a row can break the atmosphere entirely and turn it into a grind. Players who bounced off Hollow Knight for being too opaque may find similar friction here, while fans of that game should feel right at home. At its best, Sundered is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be. It wants to overwhelm you visually, unsettle you tonally, and make you feel the weight of your choices without ever spelling them out. The hand-drawn animation is genuinely exceptional, the kind of work where you can feel the individual frames even when the screen is packed with creatures. Thunder Lotus made something that sits in its own strange pocket of the genre, not the most mechanically refined metroidvania available, but one of the most atmospheric and visually distinctive ones you will find.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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