Sundered Offers Much More than Your Usual Metroidvania

Sundered is a hand-animated 2D action-adventure game by Thunder Lotus Games, the creators of Jotun. While the game might be marketing itself as a metroidvania. However, it adds a lot of its own little twists to the formula. For example, parts of the ruins that you’re exploring will change around when you die, and the enemies attack in hordes over periods of time. So, it’s both a metroidvania and a rougelite, really.

The new brain child of Thunder Lotus, Sundered, is now live on Steam and GoG.com. You take the role of Eshe, and you’ll be exploring caves and ruins, filled to the brim with various horrors and monstrosities. The game boasts many different features, which are listed on the Sundered Steam page:

• Beautiful hand­-drawn art and animation
• Terrifyingly epic boss fights
• Unique abilities that may be powerfully corrupted… at a cost
• Hundreds of upgrades and multiple character builds
• Dynamic encounters against hordes of enemies
• A mix of hand-crafted & procedural levels
• Multiple endings and over 15 hours of gameplay

So, the game mixes elements of metroidvania and rougelite, basically. As we’ve mentioned in our review of the game, the key elements of the level, which you need to explore and gather powers in order to explore further, are always in the same place. On the other hand, the rooms in between are generated randomly whenever you die, so there’s always an element of surprise. On top of that, enemies will attack you in hordes periodically, and you’ll have to make split-second decisions.

While the game is pretty stylish, hectic and fun, the one thing that it seems to lack is the narrative. There’s really no particular reason to get invested in the proceedings. That’s not necessarily a huge drawback; just don’t come in expecting some huge, epic story.

So, that’s Sundered in a nutshell. For our full opinion on the game, check out our Sundered review.