If it ain’t broke, why fix it? That seems to be the thought process behind Iron Bramble, the next game from the devs behind Rusted Moss. Like its predecessor, Iron Bramble is a pixel art metroidvania, one where you have a grappling hook that lets you swing about the place at rapid pace, only this time the setting is a “cyber-gothic megastructure” and you play a story-eating demon (?) woman in a world where humanity’s flesh bodies have all died out and their souls now reside in metal, robotic husks.
Right out the gate, the game is just so engrossing to look at. It’s filled with crunchy, deep pixel art, looking like the kind of thing you’d see posted as a proof-of-concept as opposed to the final thing. Beautiful or not, however, a metroidvania lives and dies by its traversal, and I think this one will be a Marmite situation. I’ve not played Rusted Moss, I don’t know how it feels in the hand. Iron Bramble, though, feels… perplexing.
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In my time with the demo, I definitely did not get to grips with the grappling mechanic. The way that it works is that certain surfaces allow you to use a sort of spell to hook onto them. You can swing a bit, but really it’s about timing your jumps and getting the right kind of momentum to maneuver across tricky platforming challenges. There’s a real buoyancy to it all that I couldn’t immediately click with, a point that may be a turn off for some, or an invitation to mastery for others. Early on a gun gets thrown into a mix and clearly what the game wants you to do is balance both zipping around and firing at your enemies; it’s a twin stick game so this is simple enough in concept, yet tricky to pull off in practice.
My struggle aside, I don’t think any of this is a bad thing. It’s not like I couldn’t progress, I could, and the platforming challenges are forgiving (if you hit some spikes, you don’t go back to the beginning of the room, just wherever you last landed). With enough time, I imagine it’s something I could get used to, and I’m already hungry to see how speedrunners handle it. And oh, that mysterious world. You only get a morsel to taste in the demo, ramping up that hunger pang even further.
Iron Bramble is one certainly to have on your radar! If you fancy giving it a go yourself, there’s a demo available on Steam, or you can just wishlist it ahead of its release date in 2027.