Vernal Edge

There is a specific, recognizable disappointment that comes with playing a Metroidvania in the post-Hollow Knight era. The genre has calcified. The beats are familiar: the double jump gate, the wall cling, the boss that telegraphs in three-hit patterns, the map that fills in like a coloring book. Most new entries are competent variations on a form that stopped surprising anyone around 2018.

Vernal Edge is not that. Or rather — it is that, half the time, and something considerably more interesting the other half.

Released March 14, 2023 by Hello Penguin Team LLC and published by PID Games, it landed on PC and Nintendo Switch into a market absolutely saturated with pixel-art side-scrollers. The pitch here was straightforward: what if a Metroidvania borrowed its combat not from Castervania but from Devil May Cry and Guilty Gear?

The setting is the Kingdom of Haricot, a realm literally broken into floating islands and governed by the theocratic Church of Aloe. Vernal, the protagonist, is a young woman with a temper and a grudge, hunting the father who abandoned her. Along for the ride is Chervil, an amnesiac automaton whose missing memories are, predictably, load-bearing for the plot. It is a revenge story told with more competence than flair.

The tension in this game lies in the gap between its two halves. The combat rewards patience and mastery; the navigation punishes it. Both problems are real, and both shape who this game is for.

• Combo-Based Aerial Combat: The headline system. Launch enemies skyward, juggle them with chained melee strings, cancel into spells and dashes, and — critically — carry a single combo across an entire encounter rather than a single target. It is a fighting-game engine wearing a Metroidvania’s clothes.
• Airship-Driven Non-Linearity: The vessel unlocks the archipelago in something close to arbitrary order. Islands can largely be tackled by preference rather than along a fixed critical path, which is a real structural departure from the genre’s usual funnel.
• Ability-Gated Precision Platforming: Jumping, dashing and sliding across dense, secret-stuffed maps. The traversal toolkit expands steadily, and the game expects genuine execution — not just possession of the right unlock.
• Hand-Crafted Pixel Environments: Detailed, layered pixel art with a strong sense of place across wildly varied island biomes. This is craft work, not asset-flip nostalgia.
• Combat-Literacy Boss Design: Bosses are built as exams for the combo system rather than pattern-memorization gauntlets. They reward players who actually learned the toolkit.

The Combat Is the Product

The value sits squarely in the fighting. Vernal Edge’s combat system is better than it has any right to be, and it is the single most compelling argument for this game’s existence.

Most action-Metroidvanias give you a sword, an air-dash, and a downward pogo, then call the loop complete. Vernal Edge hands you a launcher and a cancel window. That changes everything downstream. Enemies stop being health bars to whittle and become material — objects you pop into the air, keep aloft, redirect into their friends, punctuate with a spell, then dash out of to catch the next one before the first hits the ground. Skilled play produces long, unbroken chains that clear a room without Vernal’s feet touching the floor.

That’s not a gimmick — though it can look like one early on. In the first two or three hours, the juggle is superficial: too few tools are available, so launching an enemy mostly means hitting it a few times in a different vertical position. The system doesn’t reveal itself until enough cancels and abilities stack up that routing between options mid-air becomes possible. That’s a real design failure, but it’s a failure of pacing and onboarding, not of the underlying mechanic. The engine is deep. The game is bad at proving it early, and it loses people in exactly the window where it should be hooking them.

The Traversal Problem

Here is where the enthusiasm has to stop.

The jump is floaty — not in the forgiving, generous sense that good platformers cultivate deliberately, but in the sense that Vernal’s arc feels slightly decoupled from input. In a game demanding this much execution precision, that mismatch is expensive. Platforming sequences can be failed despite being understood perfectly, which is the most demoralizing way to fail anything.

Compounding it: navigation. The airship freedom is a smart structural idea that the game does not adequately support. Traditional Metroidvanias earn their obtuseness through linearity — the frontier is always roughly knowable. Open the world up and you inherit an obligation to communicate. Vernal Edge doesn’t fully meet it. The maps are dense and secret-rich, which is a virtue, but the signposting is thin enough that getting lost within the first couple of hours is an easy way to lose momentum entirely. Backtracking across the archipelago is friction the game never quite files down.

The Gameplay Loop

The rhythm is: fly somewhere, explore a dense map, fight excellent encounters against a too-limited enemy roster, find the ability, use it to unlock the map’s other half, fight a boss that tests whether the ability was actually understood. It’s a good loop. Enemy repetition dulls it — the same archetypes show up often enough that late-game combat leans on player creativity to stay fresh rather than on new problems to solve.

The story runs alongside all of this and largely fails to matter. Vernal is a sharply drawn character with real prickly personality, and Chervil is a decent foil. But the revenge plot moves through obvious gears, and the Church of Aloe is menacing in the generic way that video game theocracies always are. Serviceable. Not memorable. It’s the connective tissue, not the point.

Quality of Life

Credit where due: the modern conveniences are here. Fast travel, sane save handling, a difficulty posture that respects your time rather than punishing you for existing. Hello Penguin clearly understood that old-school structure plus old-school hostility is a combination almost nobody wants in 2023. They got the layering mostly right — which makes the navigation gaps sting more, because they demonstrably knew how to smooth an edge when they saw one.

The pixel art is the second-best thing here. Haricot’s floating islands are rendered with real environmental storytelling — layered parallax, distinct biome identities, backgrounds that suggest a world with history rather than a series of themed corridors. Character animation is where the money went, and it shows: Vernal’s combo strings are built to read cleanly at speed, which is a non-trivial technical achievement when four things are airborne simultaneously.

Performance should be a non-issue by design. This is a 2D game with modest demands — light on hardware, and the kind of game where low-latency input is the one performance metric that matters. A combo system with cancel windows lives or dies on input responsiveness, and the engine is built around it.

The UI is the weak link. Menus are functional but plain, and the map screen — the interface most consulted during frustrated moments — doesn’t do enough work. In a game with this much interconnection and this much optional freedom, the map needed to be a tool, with clear markers for unreachable exits and unresolved gates. It’s closer to a diagram.

Steam (PC): The definitive version. Low system requirements mean it should run on essentially anything, including handheld PCs, and the larger display helps with that under-communicative map. One firm recommendation: use a controller. The combat’s cancel-heavy inputs were designed around a gamepad, and while keyboard and mouse is playable, the interface gets in the way instead of the enemies. Rebinding is available and worth using.

Nintendo Switch: The natural home for the genre, but with a real trade-off. Handheld mode compresses an already-dense pixel-art world onto a small panel, and the map’s legibility problems get worse when squinting at island layouts on a small screen. Docked, it’s the better way to play. The Joy-Con d-pad is not ideal for combat this input-dense — a Pro Controller is close to mandatory for taking the combo system seriously. Portability suits the bite-sized island structure well, though; the island-hopping loop fits short sessions in a way most Metroidvanias don’t.

Vernal Edge is a game with one exceptional idea and a mediocre chassis wrapped around it. That’s a frustrating shape, because the honest recommendation depends entirely on what you want from the genre.

If the fighting is the draw, this sits near the top of the 2D field. The aerial juggle system is a legitimate contribution to a genre that mostly stopped innovating on combat years ago, and a game that swings this hard at one thing and misses on others is more interesting than another perfectly-adequate Hollow Knight tribute. But the misses are frequent enough — the floaty jump, the thin signposting, the slow onboarding — that this is hard to recommend for most people. The combat and the navigation are two different games, and which one dominates depends on whether the opening hours, where the combat is still hiding and the map is already confusing, get pushed through.

Hello Penguin has something here. The next game, with tighter jump physics and a map screen that actually does its job, could be special. This one is very good in the moments that count and irritating in the connective tissue between them. At $16.99, the price is fair for the right player — provided you go in knowing which parts to be patient with.

Buy it for the combat. Tolerate the rest.