Sundered

The pitch: a hand-drawn eldritch metroidvania with a real moral choice

Sundered drops a lone survivor into a randomized, cosmic-horror-corrupted underworld, gathering permanent shard upgrades scattered across procedurally-shuffled regions while deciding, level by level, whether to resist the eldritch corruption on offer or embrace it for extra power at a cost to her humanity and the story's eventual ending. Thunder Lotus, the studio behind Jotun, released it as a full 1.0 on 28 July 2017 with no Early Access period; a free content update called the Eldritch Edition, adding local co-op and additional story content, arrived on the same release on 21 December

2018. Roughly 4,090 Steam reviews later, it sits at Very Positive — about 82% positive — a number

that, once you read the review page itself, turns out to be carrying an unusually specific and consistent internal disagreement rather than broad, uncomplicated satisfaction.

What nobody disputes: this is one of the best-looking metroidvanias around

Start with the point of near-total agreement, because it's genuinely rare for a review page this size to converge this hard on anything. Sundered's hand-drawn art and animation draw praise from positive and negative reviews alike, often in the review's very first sentence — "this game is so good-looking I'm tempted to keep playing just to see everything," one reviewer writes, in a review that still ultimately recommends against buying it. The corruption-choice mechanic layered on top gives that presentation real narrative stakes: resisting or embracing the eldritch power on offer at each major shard changes your abilities and steers the story toward one of several distinct endings, and multiple reviewers single this out as a genuinely rare case of a metroidvania's core choice mattering beyond a stat difference.

The argument the review page keeps having with itself: horde combat vs. genre expectations

Set the art aside, and Sundered's review corpus is having one specific, recurring argument: does randomized, horde-based combat belong in a metroidvania at all? A large contingent of positive reviews genuinely loves it — "the combat being messy, chaotic, and unfair" is, for one reviewer, exactly the appeal, calling it "refreshing" against typical genre pacing. An equally large contingent of critical reviews makes the opposite case with real specificity: metroidvanias are built around careful exploration and a map you learn to navigate, and randomizing both the layout and the timing of enemy swarms undermines exactly the thing the genre is for. "It is a Metroidvania with random encounters," one widely-upvoted review puts it. "Metroidvanias are about exploration and platforming... [this] feels like it is at odds with itself at its very core." Neither side is factually wrong — it's a real, values-based design disagreement, and worth knowing which side of it you're likely to land on before buying.

Where opinion becomes measurable: the final act

One part of that argument isn't just a matter of taste, though, and Steam's own public achievement data backs it up with numbers. Fewer than 29% of all owners ever beat the game's first region boss. By the final region, that number falls to between 6% and 9% depending on the specific boss — meaning well over 90% of everyone who bought Sundered never sees its ending. That drop-off lines up precisely with a specific, detailed complaint several reviewers make independently: the final act introduces a compounding set of design changes — reviewers cite limited dodge availability and escalating horde density among them — that one reviewer describes as turning "a lot of quality things" into "a conclusion that was frustrating and punishing in spite of the player's skill," undoing the goodwill built over the first 70-75% of the game. It's a genuinely well-corroborated criticism, not just difficulty-averse grumbling, and worth taking seriously if you're weighing whether to commit to a full run.

The co-op update, and what "free" content actually delivered

The Eldritch Edition update deserves credit on its own terms: Thunder Lotus shipped it as a free addition to everyone who already owned the game rather than a paid re-release, alongside extra story beats and a new boss, which is a genuinely generous way to handle a major content pass three years into a game's life. The local co-op mode it introduced is the one part of that update this review can't fully vouch for, though — a specific, detailed 2026 report describes the second player's character as effectively non-functional, with no health bar of its own and no ability to collect items or interact with core systems, which if accurate would mean the headline feature of a "free" update doesn't actually deliver a second playable character in any meaningful sense. That's a single recent report rather than a broad pattern across years the way the horde-combat and final-act complaints are, so it's worth flagging as unverified beyond that one account rather than treating it as an established, long-running bug — but it's concrete enough, and specific enough about which systems fail, that anyone buying Sundered specifically for local co-op should investigate further before assuming it works as advertised.

Verdict

Sundered earns its Very Positive rating honestly on presentation alone — Thunder Lotus's hand-drawn art is a genuine high point of the genre, and the corruption-choice premise gives that presentation real narrative weight. Whether the metroidvania structure underneath actually works is a live, well-argued disagreement within its own review page, and the achievement data suggests the game's own difficulty curve, particularly in its final act, is costing it a meaningful share of players who never see how the story resolves. Go in for the art and the premise, know you're getting a chaotic horde-combat game wearing a metroidvania's shape rather than a traditional entry in the genre, and brace for the final stretch to ask considerably more of you than the rest of the game prepares you for.