Wira & Taksa: Against the Master of Gravity

My honest first reaction to Wira and Taksa was one of mild wonder at the premise and mild frustration at almost everything surrounding it. The core idea is genuinely appealing: you control two complementary characters on a planet called Nunh, swapping between them at will to handle whatever the level throws at you. Wira is a slow, heavy brawler who swings an Iron Hammer to clear out enemies. Taksa is a nimble sprinter who has no attack but can weave through trap-dense corridors that would leave Wira pinned. The rhythm the game is reaching for, choosing your tool for each obstacle type, is the kind of thing that can feel quietly satisfying when it clicks. Then there is the gravity mechanic, which is the thing the title is literally named after. Hitting the jump button does not send you arcing through the air in the normal sense. Instead, it flips your character to the ceiling, and you walk along it until you flip back. Certain red switches in the environment rotate gravity horizontally, bouncing you between the left and right walls instead. The concept is directly comparable to older games like VVVVVV, and on paper the layering of character-swapping with multidirectional gravity should create interesting spatial puzzles. In practice, the biggest recurring problem is that the camera sits close enough to the characters that you routinely gravity-flip into hazards you could not have seen before committing to the jump. Spikes and flames kill instantly. Wira and Taksa share a single life pool. The result is less a puzzle rhythm and more a trial-and-error loop that wears on you. The production side of things is mixed in ways that matter. The 3D-built-but-2D-viewed levels do have a scrappy visual energy, and the level geometry occasionally does something genuinely surprising when the world rotates a full 90 degrees to reveal a new plane of exploration. But the audio is a real problem. The music leans on generic loops that reviewers across the board flagged as easy-to-forget at best, and the character babble voices have been widely described as grating enough to warrant an early mute. For a game where atmosphere could have compensated for rough edges, the soundscape does the opposite of that. There is also the issue that this has been in Early Access since 2020, the developer's last noted update is over five years old, and the promised additional chapters, a desert region called Aqu and a mountain zone called Chiri, do not appear to have arrived. What you are buying is an incomplete game that may stay incomplete. I want to be fair to 3S Design, a small Peruvian studio making their first Steam release. Wira and Taksa was a finalist at the Peru Game Expo in 2017, which tells you this is a passion project with real roots. The dual-character concept is thoughtful, the gravity-flip traversal has moments where it genuinely surprises, and the story's cosmological strangeness, anchored in something about a Big Bang origin myth and a mysterious figure named Llanthu, has the kind of weird ambition I usually root for. But warmth toward the intent only goes so far when the camera undermines the central mechanic, the audio actively discourages immersion, and the Early Access roadmap has stalled without any clear signal of revival. Unless you have a specific appetite for rough-edged underdogs with unfinished maps and are comfortable with the possibility this never ships a full version, the current state of the game asks more of you than it gives back. Kai, Scout Team