Axiom Verge 2

My honest first reaction to Axiom Verge 2 was confusion, and I think that confusion is the point. The guns are gone. The tight, claustrophobic corridors of the original have opened into a sprawling overworld that stretches snow-capped mountains and flooded desert temples into the background horizon. Solo developer Thomas Happ spent six years quietly dismantling everything that made the first game comfortable, and the result is either a revelation or a mild betrayal depending on what you were hoping for. You play as Indra Chaudhari, a billionaire who drowns in an Antarctic prologue and wakes up reconstituted in a nanite body. From that moment the game is about transformation, literally and mechanically. Combat still exists, with an ice axe, a boomerang, and a hacking ability that lets you slow, jam, or fully possess robotic enemies, but fighting is not the spine of this game. Exploration is. The real machinery reveals itself once you unlock the drone and discover the Breach, a parallel 8-bit dimension you can slip into through glitchy portals. The dual-world map isn't just a gimmick. Figuring out which side of the dimensional divide to exit from in order to reach an unexplored ledge in the main world is the core puzzle loop, and it evolves in genuinely surprising ways over the campaign's roughly ten-hour run. Where Axiom Verge 2 earns its place is in its atmosphere and world-building. The biomes feel distinct, Sumerian architecture sitting alongside ruined underwater civilizations and arid desert pyramids, all rendered with a pixel art luminosity that the first game's subterranean palette never quite had. The soundtrack carries that slightly mystical, isolating quality that this kind of game lives or dies by. Indra's power-ups arrive as entities called Arms, each one carrying its own personality and a thread of the wider science-fiction narrative about consciousness, transformation, and what it means to be human when your body is software. Collect Apocalypse Flasks scattered across the map to freely upgrade her stats. It's a gentle, non-prescriptive progression system that complements the open-ended exploration rather than gating it harshly. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. The grappling hook is fiddly and unforgiving at the wrong moments, demanding near-pixel-perfect timing on certain traversal sequences that feel less designed and more accidental. Boss encounters, though mostly optional, are thin, and the few mandatory ones won't test anyone. The map can blur into a confusing tangle of corridors when you're mid-backtrack without a clear objective. Players coming directly from the first game expecting the original's firepower and structure will run into a wall early, and some never recover from the friction of that slow opening. None of these are small complaints. They represent a game that bet hard on the vania side of Metroidvania and sometimes forgot the player still needs handholds. For a certain kind of player, those trade-offs dissolve. If you have patience for a slow opening, genuine curiosity about a science-fiction universe built with unusual literary care, and love for maps that feel like real places rather than theme-park corridors, Axiom Verge 2 gets quietly under the skin. One person made this. That fact does not excuse the rough edges, but it does explain the coherence of the vision underneath them.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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