I went into Metal Eden expecting nothing in particular.
Reikon Games, the Polish studio behind Ruiner, had announced it during a State of Play in February 2025, delayed it twice — first from May, then from a vague summer window — and the critical reception when it finally landed on 2 September was what you'd charitably call mixed.
Metacritic landed it in the "mixed or average" category. Some people liked it. Most people said it was short. Nobody seemed to be talking about it the way you talk about a game that has actually done something to you.
I devoured it in a single sitting and thought about it for days afterward - it is rare since I usually play multiple games and i abandon most of them after a bit.
Metal Eden is a first-person shooter built in Unreal Engine 5 in which you play as ASKA, a Hyper Unit android sent on a suicide mission to Moebius — a vast orbital city that was supposed to be humanity's next home and has instead become something between a prison and a graveyard. The premise involves Cores, a technology that transfers human consciousness into digital storage, and the Engineers who were supposed to oversee the whole operation and have instead gone violently wrong. The story is the weakest part of the game and I am going to say almost nothing else about it. It is the frame, not the picture.
What the picture actually is: one of the most satisfying movement-and-combat loops I have played in years. ASKA moves the way very few game characters move — with weight and momentum and a sense that the space around her is something to be used rather than traversed. Wall-runs, dashes, ziplines, a jetpack that you cycle in and out of constantly. The game has seven weapons, each of which feels genuinely distinct, and a core-ripping mechanic where you can tear the power sources from weakened enemies and either absorb them to fuel your melee attack or throw them back as explosive grenades. The loop is: move, shoot, rip, punch, move again, never stop. On Normal it runs about six hours. I was not bored for a single minute of it.
Reikon made Ruiner in 2017, which was a top-down cyberpunk brawler built almost entirely in monochrome red and black, and if you played it you already understand what this studio is doing aesthetically. And I fucking love it, I keep the Ruiner artbook on my desk all the time.
Metal Eden is what happens when the same sensibility gets Unreal Engine 5 and a full colour palette to work with. Moebius is enormous — the kind of architecture that communicates both the grandeur of the original project and the specific horror of its failure, monolithic structures in deep mechanical shadow lit by neon that bleeds across reflective surfaces. The cutscenes and the in-game graphics are close enough in quality that the seam between them nearly disappears, which for a game at this budget level is genuinely impressive. The art direction was the first thing that stopped me cold, and it kept doing it throughout.
The criticism that lands most fairly is the Ball Mode — a Metroid Prime-adjacent traversal mechanic where ASKA rolls through environmental sections in a compact sphere. It exists, it is less interesting than everything else in the game, and it interrupts the flow in ways that are hard to justify. The narrative, as mentioned, is doing its best and that best is not enough. Still, the visuals alone got me so hard I couldn't drop the game for hours.
What nobody seemed to give it enough credit for was the precision of the thing. There is a specific kind of game that knows exactly what it is and executes that thing without padding, without hedging, without adding content to justify a price point. Metal Eden is six hours long because six hours is how long it should be. Every weapon is there because it needed to be there. The movement system is exactly as complex as it has to be and no more. The whole thing is calibrated in a way that most games that cost twice as much and take three times as long simply aren't. Reikon built a game where each component is good enough, and the sum of those parts is somehow brilliant.