Metal Garden is a testament to what you can do with not a whole lot. This game is 90 minutes long, and there’s no mechanical motivation to replay it. There are only 3 enemy types, 4 if you include a single boss enemy that you fight in the game’s only boss fight. The game is dead silent for almost it’s entire runtime, and the color pallet is limited to about 5 colors, and they are all the greyest ones they could find.

But I love this game despite, or maybe because, of all of that. With so few creative ingredients, it still manages to be a meal for one reason, it makes you work for it.

There is written dialog, but it is space and most often given in the form of left behind notes and overheard conversations. It paints an intersting story of differnt civilizations budding heads and captives seeking freedom, but it never tells you the fine details of it’s narrative, leaving you mind to fill in the blanks. This, along with the minimal, yet incredibly evocative imagery of its environments, makes the world feel real, it’s characters feel plausible, and every part of it feel just so goddamn cool.

And about that imagery, it’s really neat. There is a visible cheapness to some of the assets, with some looking like they come from entirely different games or having animations that don’t transition smoothly between each other. But the oddity of this works to enhance the strangeness of the world. The entire game takes place in a megastructure, so you are treated to many beautiful vistas of broken down concrete structures and foggy cliffs. It’s gorgeous, not in the AAA Sony walking simulator way, but in a way more modest and engrossing.

On top of having fantastic art and an engrossing, though sparse, narrative, the game is also pretty damn fun to play. It has gunplay and movement very similar to Halo, with floaty jumps and precision crosshairs, but the game is a bit more punishing when you take damage. You have limited health packs you collect and use whenever, but when your health bar depletes, which it does rather easily, you don’t immediately die. Instead, you earn an injury that interrupts your gameplay in some minor way. Head injuries might cause your hip fire crosshair to disappear, torso injuries might cut down your maximum health, shoulder injuries might make your aim down sights a bit unstable, leg injuries might make you stubble when sprinting, and so on. Health packs do not remove these ailments, but finding a health station in the world can fix these, much like stimpack in modern Fallout games.

There’s a great deal of friction in the combat due to the conflicting aspects of it’s design. The accurate hip fire and floaty jumps might make you think it’s a run and gunner, but high damage and harsh punishments from excessive damage will make you cower for cover. But the more you play, the more you realize that you can dodge most attacks if you just strafe fast enough. This, along with some pretty playfully brutal enemy encounters, make combat feel like a bit of a desperate scramble until you gain the confidence to dance through the chaos more elegantly.

There’s more I could praise here. I could gush about the vibes reminding me of two of my favorite games of all time: Nier Automata and Shadow of the Colossus. I could gush about how rewarding it was to find the handful of non-essential secrets hidden within it’s world. I could gush about how delightfully goofy it’s enemies would ragdoll upon death. But I don’t need to go on any further to say that this game rules. It respects your time, but will take up so much more than those 90s minutes, because it will linger in your mind for a little while after you complete it. Only good art does that, and I can confirm, it is indeed some great art.

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