Kandria

Most 2D open-world games ask you to earn your fun. They meter it out: here’s the double jump a few hours in, here’s the grapple later, now please walk back through everything you’ve already seen. Kandria refuses that bargain outright. From the moment your android protagonist wakes beneath the ruins, the entire valley — a large, hand-crafted space spanning hundreds of rooms — is open. No ability gates. No mandatory backtracking. If you can reach a ledge, you’re allowed to be there.

That single design decision tells you almost everything about Shirakumo Games, the small Swiss studio behind it. This is a developer that built its own engine in Common Lisp — a choice so idiosyncratic it borders on provocation — and then used that engine not to show off, but to make a platformer designed to feel correct under the hands. The technical flex is real, and the Lisp community has rightly made a minor legend of it, but it isn’t the product. The product is a post-apocalyptic action RPG about a machine excavating both a buried world and the reason it was buried.

Market-wise, Kandria lands in an awkward but honest spot. It’s too combat-forward to sit beside pure precision platformers like Celeste, too open and quest-driven to be a Metroidvania, and far too compact to compete with the sprawling survival-crafting games that dominate its aesthetic neighborhood. It occupies the middle: a compact, curated experience with a substantial quest list, branching companion dialogue, and a built-in level editor with Steam Workshop support stapled on for longevity. The reception has leaned warm, with praise landing consistently on traversal, characters, and the soundtrack, and criticism landing just as consistently on brevity and busywork. Both camps have a point.

• Momentum-Based Traversal: Wall-running, sliding, dashing, and a grappling hook that chains into everything else. This isn’t a mobility toolkit bolted onto combat — it is the combat, and it’s the game’s strongest element by a wide margin.
• A Genuinely Open Underground: Hundreds of hand-authored rooms with zero progression locks. Exploration is rewarded on discovery, not deferred until you own the right upgrade.
• Consequential Dialogue: Choices build or erode trust with companions and factions, and that trust steers which ending you get. The writing is sharper than the genre average by a noticeable margin.
• Built-In Level Editor: The same tools used to build the game, shipped to players, with Steam Workshop distribution. A real bid at post-campaign life.
• Substantial Extras: Unlockable outfits, achievements, and an original score that punches well above its indie weight class.

The Traversal Loop

Start here, because Kandria does. Movement in this game is built around weight and consent — two things that rarely coexist. The android has real inertia; sprinting into a slide is designed to carry you further than sprinting into a stop, and a grapple thrown at the apex of a jump converts vertical energy into horizontal speed instead of erasing it. The physics are legible, the kind that let a player stop thinking about which button does what and start thinking in trajectories.

The reason this beats “good platforming” is that the traversal system never turns off. Enter a fight and the grapple is still a grapple. You can yank yourself past an enemy’s guard, wall-run over a group to reposition, dash-cancel out of a bad commitment. Combat encounters read less like arenas you clear and more like terrain you solve at speed. When it clicks, Kandria produces the specific pleasure of a fighting game combo delivered at platformer velocity.

The honest caveat: combat depth thins out late. The moveset you have early is largely the moveset you have at the end, and enemy variety doesn’t scale fast enough to keep interrogating it. Encounters late in the campaign are solved by execution, not by thinking. That’s fine for a shorter game — it would be a fatal wound in a 40-hour one — but it’s a real ceiling, and players who love combat systems for their depth rather than their feel will hit it.

The Quest Structure

Here’s where enthusiasm cools. The quest count sounds generous, and the story missions are strong — well-paced, well-voiced in tone if not in performance, and responsive to how you’ve treated people. The companion writing in particular deserves credit: these characters have interiority, they remember, and they push back. It’s the rare indie RPG where a dialogue tree feels like a conversation rather than a vending machine.

But a meaningful chunk of that quest list is patrol, repair, and scavenge work — fetch-and-return errands dressed in setting-appropriate clothes. They exist to give the traversal system somewhere to go, and to be fair, moving fast through this world is intrinsically fun enough that the padding stings less than it would elsewhere. Still, padding is padding. When a quest’s entire content is “go to marker, press button, return to marker,” the fiction that this is an RPG rather than a movement sandbox gets thin.

The side activities — fishing, mushroom foraging, time trials, merchant trading — are a mixed bag with one clear standout. The time trials are the highlight, because they’re the only content that asks the traversal system to perform at its actual ceiling. Fishing and foraging are texture. Pleasant texture, but texture.

Onboarding and Flow

Kandria’s onboarding is unusually confident: it drops you into the conflict immediately and trusts you to figure out the movement by using it. No tutorial gauntlet, no thirty-minute leash. That confidence pays off because the controls are designed to teach themselves. There’s a learning curve on chaining grapple-to-wall-run, and the game doesn’t hold your hand through it — expect to flail for a bit, then suddenly not.

The one structural friction point is navigation in a world with no gates. Total freedom means the map has to do enormous work orienting you, and it mostly does, but the design leaves stretches — especially in the denser cavern networks — where “where am I supposed to be” becomes a real question. That’s the tax on removing progression locks, and Kandria mostly pays it. Mostly.

The pixel art is detailed rather than nostalgic, which is a distinction that matters. Shirakumo isn’t cosplaying the 16-bit era; the sprite work uses modern lighting, layered parallax, and a muted earth-and-rust palette that makes the underground feel geological rather than decorative. Character animation is the highlight — the android’s movement is designed to read clearly at every frame, which is not a stylistic nicety in a precision platformer but a functional requirement. You can see your momentum. That’s design serving mechanics.

The original soundtrack is the game’s quiet strength. It’s atmospheric where it should be and driving where it needs to be, and it’s substantial enough to survive outside the game entirely.

As for performance, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware by design, and a custom engine built specifically for it removes the usual middleware friction. The bigger technical story is the engine itself: a from-scratch Common Lisp codebase from a studio this size is an achievement most players will never notice, which is exactly the point.

Kandria is Windows and Linux only. No macOS. No console port. No handheld version. Shipping a precision platformer without a Switch or Steam Deck-verified path is a genuine reach limitation, because this is precisely the kind of game people want in handheld form.

On Steam with a controller, the game is built at its best — this is a twin-stick-and-triggers experience, and the movement system rewards analog nuance. Mouse and keyboard is a viable alternative for players who prefer it, but the traversal chains seem designed to feel most natural on a pad.

Linux support is first-class in intent, and the Lisp-engine crowd will appreciate that it isn’t an afterthought Proton wrapper. Controller configuration on Linux may still require some setup fiddling before the fun starts — a few minutes of mapping, not anything catastrophic.

Kandria is a game that knows exactly what it’s good at and builds outward from there. The traversal system is the argument, and it’s a solid one — fluid, physical, and integrated into combat instead of quarantined from it. Around it sits a compact, carefully authored underground world, characters worth talking to, and an engine that quietly outgrows its studio size.

What keeps it out of the top tier is padding and duration. Strip the fetch quests and the campaign is tight; leave them in and the seams show. The story ends sooner than the world it built deserves, and the combat stops teaching you things around the two-thirds mark. Those are real limits, not nitpicks, and they’re the reason “short for the price” keeps surfacing as the standard complaint.

Still, a compact game with one strong system beats a sprawling one with none. Shirakumo built its own engine, in Lisp, to make an underground valley feel good to move through — and by design, it does. That’s worth your attention, and worth the $5.99 if you buy it for the movement rather than the story. Go in for the grapple. Stay for the surprisingly good people you meet down there.