Supraland is a game I’ve been eyeing for a while, and only recently got the hardware for. (It’s one of those “all games must be computer-meltingly photorealistic” affairs.) It is billed as a “First-Person Metroidvania”, like Metroid Prime, and has a cutely weird premise of taking place in a child’s extremely elaborate sandbox, with every character and object being a toy of some kind.
I liked it a lot more than Metroid Prime, chiefly because it had a mouse-based control scheme that meant basic actions weren’t like pulling teeth. I found it fun overall, but also a bit shallow, with not enough complexity to really carry the full game.
My chief problem with the game is that exploration doesn’t feel rewarding. Areas are chock-full of secret areas and treasure chests, but it’s exceptionally rare for them to reward you with qualitatively distinct upgrades. Instead, almost all of the upgrades are minor stat increases to health and attack power for your different weapons. This might have been interesting if the game had an engaging combat system, but it does not; enemy attack patterns are extremely simple, they rarely last more than a few hits, and dying doesn’t meaningfully hurt your progress in any way. Combat in this game unfortunately feels like a tedious chore that only distracts from the actual fun bits, so spending half an hour wracking my brain over a tricky puzzle only to be rewarded with a few extra attack points for a weapon I don’t even use is a huge let-down. (Admittedly, I tend to feel the same way about Metroid‘s oodles of unnecessary missile expansions.)
When the game does give you new tools, though, they are delightful. After the first one (which is just your standard ranged weapon), I was legitimately surprised and impressed by how radically they changed the game and how I looked at environments. Objects that I would previously dismiss as window dressing kept turning out to have gameplay applications, and so I was constantly re-evaluating my understanding of the mechanics.
I also enjoyed the strong puzzle focus in this. The game cites Zelda and Portal as inspirations, and I can definitely see that, especially Portal. To my surprise, I didn’t even mind the first-person platforming too much — you get a lot of aerial maneuverability, and areas are almost always designed so that you can quickly get back up if you fall off of something.
My biggest criticism, aside from the tedious and intrusive combat, is that the game often falls into the puzzle trap of “I didn’t know I could do that.” There are a lot of mechanics that are introduced only for one puzzle, and a bunch more that are never formally explained to you, like that your gun projectile changes color if it passes through something. Special mention goes to the Supraball mechanics, which I initially thought was a powerup I missed; the NPC who’s supposed to teach you about them doesn’t explain what a Supraball is or looks like, and the introductory puzzle makes it intentionally hard to realize those things by accident. While unlike some games I didn’t think any of the mechanics were extraneous, the game really needed to explain them a lot better.
Relatedly, the game really needed to signpost the important optional upgrades better. I spent about half the game not realizing that I missed the ability to destroy spawn points, because how was I supposed to know that this one random chest held a vital ability instead of yet another +1 sword damage? Gating the final spawnpoint destroyers behind the postgame was also a weird choice; if we got the ability from the start or midway through I could have been chipping away at spawnpoints the whole game, but instead you have to do it all at once, turning it into a chore rather than anything that enhances the experience.
Overall, despite my gripes, I would still say it’s worth trying if you like Metroidvanias and puzzle games, but it’s not worth trying for 100%. There’s a free demo, so that might be a good chance to see if it clicks for you.