Players control a space traveler who wakes on a spaceship called the Sarcophagus, which imprisons a demon named Ultros.

Making precision attacks with advanced skills to defeat bosses gives players more powerful power-ups.

As a child, he believed Sonic the Hedgehog was more coherent than the competing Super Mario series, which he said felt like "an amalgam of very different ideas".

Åkerblad wanted to evoke the ecologically-themed terror and wonder of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and the difficulty of communicating with a non-human intelligence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The studio is based in Sweden,[4] but composer Oscar Rydelius traveled to Peru to record indigenous instruments and ambient sounds in the Amazon rainforest.

[2] Comparing it to the work of Ovid, Eurogamer praised how Ultros changed the focus of a Metroidvania game from exploration to transforming the world while also having excellent combat, artwork, and music.

[15] Push Square said Ultros has stunning and memorable art, but they felt the combat and controls did not live up to these highs.