ULTRAKILL

I keep coming back to the moment ULTRAKILL clicked for me, and it wasn't a flashy boss or a wall-jump. It was when I realized the game was literally designed to punish cowardice. Standing still drains your options. Hiding in a corner means death. The only way to heal is to close the distance on an enemy, bathe in their blood, and keep moving. That single design choice, aggressive healing at close range, cascades into every decision you make and turns a first-person shooter into something closer to a kinetic sculpture. Developed almost entirely by one person, Arsi "Hakita" Patala, ULTRAKILL sends you into a layered interpretation of Hell as V1, a blood-fueled machine with nothing to lose. The arsenal is deceptively deep: the Piercer Revolver lets you fire coins and split charge shots off them for ricocheting chain kills, the Attractor Nailgun fires magnets that pull projectiles into orbit around a point in space, and the Sawed-On Shotgun's melee chainsaw breaks after enough non-lethal hits, making every tool feel deliberately finite and interesting. Each weapon has a primary and alternate mode, and the real craft lives in combining them, grappling an airborne stone head into a wall punch, or firing a rocket into pooled Firestarter oil for area denial. The game tracks how creatively you kill and actively penalizes repeating the same combo, so the style meter is not a scoreboard novelty but a genuine pressure system pushing you toward invention. The structure follows Dante's layers, Limbo, Lust, Gluttony and beyond, with each act escalating in enemy complexity and level ambition. Boss fights are the sharpest skill checks here. V2, your rival machine built from the same blueprint, mirrors your own moveset and will expose every gap in your technique. The Minos Prime encounter in the first Prime Sanctum (unlocked only by P-ranking every level in an act) is the kind of fight people make video essays about. Alongside the campaign there is the Cyber Grind, an endless survival arena with a community leaderboard, a sandbox mode, and a collection of secret levels that parody other genres entirely. The February 2025 ULTRA_REVAMP update overhauled most of the game's visuals and technical foundation, and the Layer 8: Fraud release in early 2026 added four more intricately looping levels and surged the game to over 71,000 concurrent players, remarkable for a still-technically-in-Early-Access solo-developed indie. Performance can dip on mid-range hardware during the new Fraud layer's more elaborate geometry, so toggling Simple Explosions is a practical first move. The honest caveats are few but worth naming. The story exists and has a mythology worth reading, but it absolutely steps aside the moment combat starts. Newcomers may find the Prelude, the opening stretch, misleadingly simple; the real character of the game emerges in Layer 1 and beyond, where the music sharpens, enemy variety expands, and the soundtrack shifts into the heavy, synth-laced metal that the combat deserves. If you want narrative immersion above mechanical depth, ULTRAKILL will feel thin. If you want a game that rewards curiosity, reflexes, and the willingness to embarrass yourself until you don't, this is one of the most generously designed shooters in recent memory.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on ULTRAKILL.