Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

My first few minutes with Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet felt like watching an animated short from a studio that had somehow wandered into game development by accident, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Animator Michel Gagné's visual language is all over this thing: stark, inky silhouettes offset by bruised purples and sickly greens, a world where every surface seethes and every background element hints at something alive and hostile beneath it. The craftsmanship here is genuinely rare. This is a 2D Metroidvania where you pilot a small flying saucer piloted by a curious little alien into the guts of a planet that is, as advertised, insanely twisted. No dialogue, no exposition dumps, no waypoint markers barking at you. The game trusts you to read it. The structure follows the classic gating loop: explore, find a tool, backtrack and open what was previously closed. Nine attachments unlock across the run, each one doing real mechanical work. The mining saw cuts through specific rock formations, the claw arm anchors you against strong currents and wind, the laser beam reflects off crystals and activates switches from across a room, the rocket launcher handles armored targets, and the tractor beam lets you pull objects into puzzle solutions. Each of the six biomes (ice caverns, underwater zones, acid swamplands, mechanical engine rooms, an electrical zone that hums with a low, unsettling charge) is built around one or two of these tools in ways that feel considered rather than arbitrary. The radial menu for swapping attachments is smart, and your four favourites can be pinned to face buttons, which matters when a boss is closing in. Speaking of bosses: the bigger fights require reading the room rather than just burning down a health bar, and a few of them demand you use tools in ways the game has not quite spelled out. That creative friction is where the game earns its score. Where it stumbles is on the combat side of the equation. The default energy projectile is genuinely weak, enemy movement is erratic in a way that feels less designed and less polished than everything else, and the spacing between health pickups means fights rarely feel dangerous, just occasionally annoying. The narrative collectibles scattered across the map (concept art, brief cinematic clips) are thin rewards for the backtracking they demand. The campaign runs roughly five to six hours, and a portion of reviewers found that too short for a Metroidvania that teases a larger world. I will push back on that slightly. The pacing inside those hours is nearly flawless, the game never outstays its welcome in any single zone, and a short runtime that respects its ending is something I will defend every time. The co-op offering splits into two modes. Lantern Run, the main event, drops up to four players (local or online) into a randomly generated corridor where a colossal alien creature is chasing you while you ferry a beacon toward safety. It is tense, requires real coordination on tool use and positioning, and holds up surprisingly well as a separate experience from the campaign. The Shadow Hunters DLC mode expands this further but carries the asterisk that low online player counts make matchmaking with strangers unlikely; this is functionally a play-with-friends mode at this point in the game's life. The audio sits somewhere between ambient and unsettling, a low orchestral hum with creature sounds stitched through it that reinforces the isolation beautifully. It is not a particularly bold or dynamic score, but it fits the game's quiet strangeness perfectly. If you have a tolerance for a short, well-formed Metroidvania over a sprawling one, and you respond to handcrafted visual artistry the way some of us respond to a gorgeous illustrated novel, this game is worth your time. It will not stress-test your reflexes, and it will not give you forty hours of content. What it will give you is five or six hours of genuine wonder at how much personality a small team can pack into a UFO and a silhouette.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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