I absolutely loved Metal Garden, but I can’t write a Steam review of it because I didn’t play on Steam. Still have some thoughts though.

Obviously, the game was good enough for me to want to write about, right? Well, the mechanics of it were obviously super lame. It was about as much of a generic shooter as a generic shooter could be. The prose is mediocre at best, too, and the story is disjoint and honestly not even particularly memorable.

But like… It’s a thing. It’s a concrete, well designed, complete thing from end to end. I’m just… I’m so used to drowning in a world full of games that try way too hard to be way more than they are, right? Even cutting through all the massive-audience live-service slop, A lot of games just suck at being a discrete thing.

I don’t know. It’s really nice to be able to still have things in 2026. I want to round up all the people who are making things and lock them in a hermitage where the horrors of the world can’t reach them, and they can continue making things, forever and ever, regardless of their utility. I want humanity to emit an infinite fractal of imaginary things For no reason other than that it’s all we can do to differentiate ourselves against the noise of entropy- Well, that and I’m curious to see where that will go.

That’s all to say, Metal Garden resonated with me. I like that it can imagine a far, far future and work out all the details. It’s like, a miniature simulation? It’s cohesive, for sure. Not that like, any of the stuff in Metal Garden is sci-fi; it’s more of a bizarre fantasy piece than anything. On reflection, maybe I’m giving it too much credit.

Things that went well:

• Good color palette
• Fun and interesting environmental designs
• Pleasant minimalistic style allocated details in the correct places
• Really tugs at your curiosity and makes you want to explore

Things that sucked:

• Poor prose quality
• Didn’t stick the landing at the end
• Poor power scaling parity (we can’t shake our common ancestor of power-trip RPGs like doom, can we?)
• I don’t find single player shooter games like this fun.
• Spatial reasoning puzzles are so boring.
• Too linear, not enough to explore?

It’d be nice to have a review aggregator on my site. You know, something that pulls from VNDB, Steam, Goodreads, and my blog… Then squares the circle! I like being able to provide a comprehensive picture of my media preferences.