Metaverse Keeper / 元能失控

I went into Metaverse Keeper half-expecting another disposable Binding-of-Isaac clone dressed in sci-fi colours, and it is absolutely in that neighbourhood, but there is a sincerity to how Sparks Games built this thing that kept pulling me back to the hub ship between runs. It is a top-down dungeon crawler where four agents, each recruited from a different corner of a fractured space-time, charge through procedurally generated rooms aboard a drifting vessel called the Bastion. You fight, you die, you return. The loop is familiar, but the execution has enough personality to earn its place in the genre. The mechanical heart of the game is the Chip system. As you clear rooms you accumulate energy, then spend it at Chip Machines to slot passive upgrades onto your weapons or fuel your agent's special abilities. Howard the astronaut can blink forward and generate twin portal gates to traverse mid-fight; other agents bring their own distinct tools. Over 160 Chips are in the pool, and the combinatorial space is wide enough that two consecutive runs rarely feel identical. Weapons number over a hundred types, and because the Chip loadout can reshape how any weapon behaves, you are effectively building a character mid-dungeon every time. That is the game at its best: a run where the Chips align, the weapon clicks, and the whole thing sings. Between runs, cassette tapes fund permanent blueprint upgrades at the hub, giving you a gentle ratchet of progression that makes failure sting a little less each time. The honest caveat is that the game is clearly built around co-op first. Playing solo, the difficulty curve feels slightly miscalibrated, with boss encounters spiking in a way that can feel punishing rather than earned. Reviewers across multiple platforms noted that boss difficulty can spike abruptly, bringing otherwise solid runs to an unsatisfying halt. The story layer is thin, delivered mostly as text you read rather than characters you hear, so do not arrive expecting narrative depth. The music shifts appropriately between the Bastion hub and the dungeon biomes, though opinions differ on whether the soundtrack fully carries the atmosphere, with some players finding it a touch sparse during combat. What redeems the rougher edges is co-op, which supports up to four players locally or online. When playing with others, loot drops are distributed individually so there is almost no friction over resources, and a downed teammate can be revived if a surviving player sacrifices some health. That small mechanic encourages genuine teamwork rather than abandonment. The cartoon art style sits somewhere between warm and slightly eerie, colourful early biomes giving way to progressively darker, more oppressive environments as runs deepen. It never looks lavish, but it has a coherent visual identity that a lot of cheap dungeon crawlers skip entirely. If you are a solo rogue-lite player with no co-op partner in sight, manage your expectations: this is a decent but not essential experience in that mode. If you have even one reliable co-op partner, the game opens up considerably. Steam's user reception has settled around a broadly positive majority, which feels about right. Sparks Games built something genuinely playable and occasionally delightful, even if it has never fully escaped Early Access roughness around the seams.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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