Voidwrought

There’s a moment in Voidwrought — dashing across a collapsed hall of the Gray City, wall-clinging off a shattered pillar, landing a downward strike into something with far too many limbs — where the design sings on paper. The movement kit is crisp. The impact is meant to have weight. The hand-drawn backgrounds recede into cold, star-scorched depth. And then the comparison arrives unbidden: this has been played before.

That tension defines the entire experience. Developed and published by Powersnake, Voidwrought is a hand-drawn 2D Metroidvania action-platformer set in a cosmic-horror world where the ruins of the First Civilisation are thawing out beneath a dying sky. You play the Simulacrum, an artificial being built to hunt the eldritch gods hoarding Ichor, the blood of the divine. It’s evocative setup. It’s also, structurally and visually, a near-perfect overlay on Team Cherry’s masterpiece — and the game knows it.

The market position is unambiguous: this is a mid-tier indie priced and scoped as a comfortable weekend-and-a-half ($5.99, released October 24, 2024), aimed squarely at players who finished Hollow Knight, waited years for Silksong, and wanted something in the meantime that moved the same way. On that specific brief, Voidwrought delivers. Critic scores — a Metacritic average of 76 — skew reserved, which is the signature of a game that’s satisfying to play and hard to write something new about. Both things are true. It ships on Steam and Nintendo platforms. No mobile version exists, and given the input demands, that’s the correct call rather than a missing feature.

• Hand-Drawn Cosmic-Horror Art Direction: Every environment is illustrated rather than tiled, with a muted, bruised palette and genuinely unsettling creature silhouettes across a large bestiary and a full slate of major bosses.
• Relic & Soul Loadout System: A wide set of mixable modifiers — spectral weapons, passive buffs, defensive trinkets, and playstyle-warping effects — swapped freely rather than committed to a locked skill tree.
• Shrine Excavation & Followers: A dedicated base-building loop where you dig out the rubble of the Gray City to expand an underground shrine and recruit followers who unlock services and upgrades.
• Traversal-First Movement Kit: Dashes, wall-clings and progressively unlocked abilities that gate the interconnected map and then blow it wide open.
• New Game+ and Hardcore Mode: A post-launch addition bundling difficulty modifiers plus a permadeath-flavored Hardcore run, added in response to difficulty complaints.
• Platform Conveniences: Multiple languages, achievements, Cloud saves, and a free demo.

The Gameplay Loop

Voidwrought’s core loop is traversal, combat, upgrade, repeat — and its greatest strength on paper is the first of those three. The movement kit is designed for low input latency and high recovery generosity. Dashes are built to cancel cleanly. Wall-clings are tuned to snap without the mushy half-second of commitment that ruins lesser platformers. The Simulacrum is designed to accelerate fast and stop fast, which should make the map read as a playground rather than an obstacle course. Backtracking through an early zone with three new abilities is the loop’s clear promise.

Combat is melee-forward and deliberately weighty, with impact frames on strikes and a downward pogo — yes, that one — present and tuned. But here’s the honest assessment: Voidwrought is meaningfully easier than the games it’s modeled on. Enemy telegraphs are long. Punishment windows are forgiving. Most bosses should fall within a few attempts for anyone with Metroidvania muscle memory. For a large slice of the audience this is a feature, not a bug — the genre’s reputation for hostility gatekeeps a lot of people who’d otherwise love it. But if you came looking for the specific, awful, wonderful feeling of grinding your face against a wall until the wall gives, the base game will not provide it.

That’s precisely why the New Game+ update matters more than typical post-launch content. Adding stackable difficulty modifiers and a Hardcore mode wasn’t a bonus; it was a correction, and a well-judged one. It’s also the clearest evidence that Powersnake responds to its audience.

The Build System

The Relic and Soul system is where Voidwrought does its most interesting original thinking. Rather than a rigid progression tree, you assemble a loadout from a large pool of modifiers that can be swapped at will. Spectral weapons change your attack profile outright. Passives adjust economy and survivability. A handful of playstyle-defining modifiers reshape how a run feels — building for aggressive melee sustain plays nothing like building for spectral chip damage at range.

The freedom to remix without penalty is the smart part. It converts experimentation from a costly decision into a cheap one, which means players can actually experiment instead of locking into the first competent build and coasting. The weakness is balance breadth: a subset of relics are obviously stronger than the rest, and once a player finds that combination there’s little pressure to abandon it. The system offers more options than it offers reasons.

The Shrine

The excavation and shrine-building side system is the game’s most distinctive idea and, frustratingly, its most under-exploited. Digging out the Gray City’s rubble to construct an underground sanctuary and recruit followers who unlock services is a lovely counterweight to the hostility of the overworld — a place that gets warmer as everything else gets colder. Mechanically, though, it functions largely as a services hub. It gates convenience rather than capability. Push this system harder — tie shrine expansion to world state, or let follower choices foreclose others — and it becomes the thing people remember Voidwrought for. As shipped, it’s a very good idea operating well below its potential.

The Narrative

This is the soft spot, and it’s not close. The setup is strong: an artificial being hunting gods for their blood, in ruins thawing out from under a scorched star. What follows is vague to the point of absence. Environmental storytelling requires the environment to actually be telling you something specific, and Voidwrought too often gestures at profundity — ancient civilisation, divine blood, cosmic indifference — without committing to detail. Ambiguity is a technique. Here it reads closer to a gap. Players will finish this game with a clear sense of its mood and almost no sense of its events.

The art is the reason to buy this game. Every frame is hand-drawn, and unlike many indies that claim the label, Voidwrought’s environments carry real illustrative depth — layered parallax, ink-heavy silhouettes, and a restrained palette of bone whites, bruise purples and voids of actual black. The eldritch designs land. Several bosses are built to be legitimately unnerving on first reveal, which is a difficult trick to pull in 2D.

The score deserves a specific callout. It’s atmospheric rather than melodic, leaning on drone, texture and long silences, and it does an enormous amount of load-bearing work in a game whose story won’t. Headphones recommended.

Technically, a 2D hand-drawn presentation at this fidelity is light on modern hardware by design, so there’s little performance risk. The UI is clean and unobtrusive, though the map screen leans harder on iconography than on labels — readable once learned, briefly opaque before that. The persistent legibility concern is small interface text at a distance, which matters more on some platforms than others.

Steam (PC): The definitive version. Controller is strongly recommended — the movement kit is built around analog nuance and shoulder-button dashes, and keyboard play works without ever feeling native. Steam achievements, Cloud saves, and the free demo are all here. High-refresh displays flatter the animation work, and the crispness of the movement is most apparent here. If you’re deciding between platforms and have no strong preference, buy it on PC.

Nintendo Switch: The more interesting case. Voidwrought’s scope and 2D presentation make it a natural fit for the hardware, and the pick-up-and-play rhythm of a Metroidvania with fast traversal suits handheld sessions well. The genuine caveat is the one that hits every atmospheric 2D game on a small screen: a dark palette and small UI text are a harder read in handheld mode than docked. The art survives the downscale; the interface fights it. Cloud saves don’t span ecosystems either, so pick a platform and stay there. If portability is what gets you to actually finish games, take the Switch version and accept the tradeoff.

There is no iOS or Android release, and that’s a design decision rather than an oversight. Virtual sticks would gut precisely the thing this game does best.

Voidwrought is a competent game with an identity problem, and those are harder to recommend than bad games. Nothing here is lazy — the animation work, the enemy variety, the tuning of the dash, the score, all of it reflects real craft. Powersnake built something that plays well and, judging by the New Game+ update, actually responds to its audience.

But craft isn’t the same as voice. Too much of Voidwrought is a careful reproduction of choices someone else made first, and the two systems that are its own — the shrine and the Relic loadouts — aren’t pushed hard enough to become the reason to recommend it. The story, which should have been the escape hatch from the comparison, is the weakest thing in the box. At $5.99, genre devotees lose little by trying it — the demo will tell them everything within twenty minutes — but for most people, this is one to watch rather than one to buy. Keep an eye on Powersnake: the fundamentals on display here are strong enough that the next one, if it stops looking over its shoulder, could be something.