Valfaris

A tiny team made this. That’s the fact worth sitting with before anything else, because Valfaris looks and sounds like it came out of a studio with three times the headcount and ten times the budget. Steel Mantis — artist Andrew Gilmour and a very small circle of collaborators — previously shipped Slain: Back from Hell, a game that launched rough and had to be rebuilt in public over the following months. That history matters. Valfaris reads as the work of a team that took a public beating, went away, and figured out exactly what it got wrong.

The setup is pure heavy metal album cover, and it knows it. Therion, son of the ruler of the fortress-world of Valfaris, returns to a citadel that vanished and then reappeared in orbit around a dying sun. Something got in. Something changed it. Across a compact run of stages you carve through cathedral corridors rotting from the inside, alien flesh-pits that pulse and breathe, and industrial hellscapes lit like a Frazetta painting. Enemies do not fall over politely. They come apart.

Positioned against its obvious peers — Contra, Metal Slug, Turrican, and the modern boutique-difficulty crowd — Valfaris sits in a deliberately narrow lane. It isn’t a Metroidvania. There’s no map to fill in, no backtracking economy, no exploration loop dressed up as content. It’s a linear, stage-based shooter with a persistent upgrade layer bolted on, and that focus is a feature. Its 86 on Metacritic is a strong number for a genre that usually gets filed under “niche” and left there.

The praise is nearly unanimous on presentation. The arguments are all about one system — and it’s the same system Steel Mantis clearly considers the soul of the design.

• Three-slot combat kit: A rechargeable primary blaster that never runs dry, a melee weapon (chainsaw-sword, flaming spear, and stranger things), and a heavy Destroyer weapon gated by limited energy. All three are live at once — no menu diving, no loadout screens mid-fight.
• A deep arsenal of upgradeable armaments: Found throughout the campaign and improved with Blood Metal, the same currency that buys health and shield expansions. Every upgrade is a trade against survivability.
• Resurrection Idols: The checkpoint currency. Spend one to set a save point, or bank it to purchase weapon upgrades. You cannot do both. This is the game’s defining mechanic and its most divisive.
• Pattern-driven boss set pieces: Screen-filling biomechanical horrors with legible, learnable attack cycles — the good kind of hard.
• Full Metal Mode: A New Game+ unlocked on completion that carries your arsenal forward into a meaner run.
• Original soundtrack by Curt Victor Bryant, formerly of Celtic Frost. Not licensed metal. Not “metal-inspired.” Actual extreme metal, written for this.

The Gameplay Loop

Valfaris moves. Therion is heavy without being sluggish — there’s real mass in the animation, a wind-up to the melee swing, a recoil shove to the heavy weapons — but the controls are built to carry that weight rather than fight it. The core loop is clean: advance, read the screen, pick the right tool from three, commit.

That three-slot structure is the smartest thing here. Most run-and-guns give you a weapon and a bomb. Valfaris gives you a rhythm. The primary blaster recharges, so it’s your default and your recovery state. Melee closes distance and — critically — deflects certain projectiles, which turns the shield-and-swing into an active defensive verb rather than a desperation move. The Destroyer is the punctuation mark: finite, devastating, and constantly tempting. The result is a combat grammar where you’re cycling through resources by necessity, not preference. Sit on the blaster and you’ll get overwhelmed. Lean on the Destroyer and you’ll be empty when the boss arrives.

Enemy design supports this well. Encounters are built as small puzzles of positioning — a shielded brute here, a turret pinning a corridor there, a swarm designed to punish anyone who stands still. Enemies burst into gibs under sustained fire, which sounds like a cosmetic note but functions as feedback: damage is legible on screen. In a genre where hit confirmation is often two frames of white flash, that clarity is worth a great deal.

The Idol Problem

Here’s where the assessment has to get honest.

Resurrection Idols are the game’s signature idea. Every idol you spend creates a checkpoint. Every idol you don’t spend can be converted into weapon upgrades at the next shrine. The design intent is elegant on paper: confidence becomes a resource. Play well, skip the checkpoint, get stronger. Play badly, save often, stay weak.

In practice, it introduces a second, worse game running on top of the first. You are no longer just fighting the level — you are constantly auditing your own performance, mid-stage, under fire, with incomplete information about what’s coming. That’s not tension. That’s anxiety with a spreadsheet attached. The system’s core flaw is informational: it asks you to bet on your ability to clear content you haven’t seen yet. A player who correctly judges themselves capable and then dies to an off-screen ambush hasn’t been outplayed — they’ve been ambushed by a design that withheld the information the bet required.

And the ambushes are real. Enemies drop in from off-screen. Instant-death hazards appear in a genre where the player is trained to move forward at speed. There are difficulty spikes that land less like escalation and more like a door slamming. Combine that with the idol economy and the design risks punishing the exact behavior it’s asking for.

To be fair to it, the system does work when it works. Clearing a long stretch on nerve alone and cashing banked idols into a weapon that reshapes the next stretch is a genuinely great feeling, and no conventional checkpoint scheme produces it. The problem is the failure state. A conventional checkpoint costs you moments; an idol gamble lost costs you a long replay and the upgrade you were saving for.

The fix Steel Mantis didn’t ship: telegraph the length of the run ahead. Give players a shrine-side indicator of how far the next checkpoint is. That’s it. That one piece of information converts a blind bet into a real decision, and the whole system snaps into place.

Progression and Length

Blood Metal is the quieter economy and the better-balanced one. Upgrades to health and shields compete directly with weapon investment, which produces meaningful builds — a glass-cannon Destroyer specialist plays noticeably differently from a tanky melee bruiser. The arsenal is deep without being padded, and the standouts are memorable enough to argue about.

The campaign is short, and there’s no pretending otherwise — but it’s also disciplined. There is no filler stage. Full Metal Mode is the right kind of New Game+: it carries your arsenal forward so the added difficulty tests execution rather than resetting your investment.

Gilmour’s pixel art is the reason this game will still be discussed in ten years. It isn’t nostalgia cosplay. The resolution is modern, the animation counts are high, and the palette work — sickly greens bleeding into hot orange, deep blacks that actually read as depth — is the work of someone with a painter’s eye rather than a retro filter. The biomechanical creature design is grotesque in a specific, committed way: everything organic looks infected, everything mechanical looks like it’s growing.

The parallax layers do heavy narrative lifting. You learn what happened to Valfaris by looking past the play field.

And the soundtrack is not a bonus feature. Bryant’s score is written at the combat — riffs that lock to encounter pacing, the low end mixed so heavy weapons sit inside the music instead of on top of it. It’s the standout element, and that’s mildly unfair to the art, which is just as good.

Technically, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the build appears designed accordingly — fixed-resolution pixel art and short stages leave little room for the kind of trouble that sank Slain‘s launch. After that history, that’s the most reassuring thing in the package.

Steam: Play it with a controller. That isn’t a preference, it’s a requirement in everything but name. Aiming is eight-directional with a lock-facing modifier, which maps naturally to a stick and awkwardly to WASD-plus-mouse — the mouse gives you precision the game has no use for while taking away the analog control it actually wants. On a handheld PC it’s a natural fit: fixed-resolution pixel art, short stage lengths, and a control scheme built for sticks and shoulder buttons.

Nintendo Switch: Arguably the better version, with one caveat. The art holds up beautifully on the handheld panel — dense pixel work benefits from the smaller screen’s pixel density, and the dark palette reads better without ambient light washing it out. Stages are sized for a commute. But the idol system is meaningfully worse on the go. Losing a banked run because you glanced up at a train stop is a specific and avoidable misery, and it makes the Switch build a game for deliberate sittings rather than stolen minutes. Joy-Con analog precision is adequate; a Pro Controller d-pad is better.

Valfaris is a small team operating at the ceiling of its ambition, and it mostly gets there. The art is superb. The soundtrack is superb. The moment-to-moment combat is tight, weighty, and legible in ways much larger studios routinely fumble. Steel Mantis learned the right lessons from Slain and shipped something confident.

The Resurrection Idol system is the thing standing between a good game and a very good one — and it isn’t a bad idea. It’s an under-communicated one. Bets are only interesting when you can price them. Pair that with off-screen ambushes and instant-death hazards, and the game occasionally punishes players for trusting exactly the design it built.

We recommend it to the right audience: play it on a pad, ideally on Switch or a handheld PC, and go in expecting to lose progress. What you get in exchange is a short campaign of beautifully rendered violence in the genre, scored by someone who actually knows what a riff is for. For players with the stomach for its gamble, that’s a better trade than most games this size are offering.