Teslagrad 2

My first hour with Teslagrad 2 was one of those sessions where I kept forgetting to take notes because the movement felt too good to stop. Lumina threads through fjord-side corridors by combining a short-range Blink teleport, a momentum-building ground slide, a throwable charged axe, and a magnetic cloak that snaps her to colour-matched surfaces like a lightning bolt finding its ground. Late in the game those tools chain together into something quietly spectacular: pop out of a waterfall with the upgraded Blink, slam a slope, ride the slide into a ramp, throw the axe at a far-off platform, and coast up to a ceiling using magnetism. Rain Games clearly understands kinetic pleasure, and the hand-painted environments they place it inside are genuinely gorgeous, worth stopping to look at even when the pacing is pushing you forward. The world Rain Games built here, Wyrmheim, is a Scandinavian wilderness of fjords, Viking ruins, and abandoned towers, delivered entirely through visual storytelling. There is no dialogue, no voiceover, no on-screen text to hold your hand; even inscriptions in the world are untranslated Nordic glyphs. The story of Lumina trying to get home lands mostly through animations and atmosphere rather than plot, and for some players that wordless quality will feel mysterious and considered. For others it will feel thin. The 81 collectable lore cards scattered through the map do add context if you hunt for them, but they are strictly optional and their rewards are more flavour than function. Here is where I have to be honest with fans of the original: this sequel is lighter on exploration than it looks. The Metroidvania structure is present in name, but the world funnels you forward with enough momentum that backtracking rarely feels meaningful, and collectibles carry almost no mechanical weight. Boss fights are cinematic and atmospheric, with the folk-orchestral soundtrack building to genuinely haunting crescendos during them, but several bosses are more spectacle than challenge. The physics can work against you too, particularly when the magnetic cloak snaps to the wrong polarity mid-air and sends Lumina into a spike. Checkpoints are generous enough that deaths stay frustrating rather than punishing, but the slipperiness is a persistent friction point critics noticed across multiple platform versions. The runtime is the conversation no review of this game can dodge. A focused first playthrough lands somewhere between two and five hours depending on how much you explore, and the game ends at exactly the moment the moveset feels fully realized. That is not a philosophy problem, it is a pacing one. The ideas present here deserve another act. OpenCritic aggregated around 30 critic scores to a 72 average, with the gap between defenders and detractors almost entirely explained by how each reviewer feels about short games with underused potential. Steam user reviews sit at a solid 77 percent positive from around 400 reviews, which tells you the experience itself is genuinely enjoyable; it just leaves you wanting more of it. If you have never played the original Teslagrad, this works fine as a standalone introduction to the series. The hand-craft in every pixel of every background is the kind of work I find myself defending loudly, and the Norse folk score that carries the fjord village sections is one of the better atmospheric soundtracks a small indie has produced in recent memory. The question is purely whether the runtime justifies the full price. At a discount, or as part of a subscription, this is an easy afternoon well spent with one of the most elegant traversal systems in modern 2D platforming.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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