Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is a steampunk-themed metroidvania about harnessing an evil power to use against your enemies. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Review Overview
What is Gestalt: Steam & Cinder?
In the Steampunk city of Canaan, ominous secrets and mysteries hide within all of its twisting corners and alleys. Aletheia, an elite Soldner, is given a job to go on an epic quest to uncover all that which Canaan hides. What will Aletheia discover?
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder features:
⚫︎ Steampunk theme
⚫︎ Upgradeable skills
⚫︎ Melee and ranged combat
⚫︎ Adapting narrative
⚫︎ RPG level progression
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Gestalt: Steam & Cinder's gameplay and story.
 Steam |
$19.99 |
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Accommodating Combat Engaging Story |
Inconvenient Checkpoints Bothersome Level Scaling |
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Overall Score - 80/100
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is a great newcomer to the metroidvania scene that flaunts its well-polished combat to the world, despite how basic the mechanics are. But that doesn’t stop the game from being an enjoyable experience. Its strong narrative pulls you into the rabbit hole known as that game’s world where it will subsequently keep you in with its very accessible difficulty and the need to learn more.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Story - 8/10
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder has a strong pull on its narrative. It’s full of drama, suspense, and intrigue that it basically leads you into playing the game just to find out what happens next. The pacing is just right as well, all things considered. On the other hand, the dialogues have too much filler that it sometimes becomes a hassle to read everything.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Gameplay - 9/10
Simple but versatile. That is the charm of Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s gameplay. While you are mostly limited to your sword and gun, the game provides a wide array of moves to make full use of them in combat. It doesn’t feel suffocating at all, and in fact, feels liberating.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Visuals - 8/10
While the game doesn’t have any particularly spectacular scenes or artworks, the sprite work and visual effects are designed with excellent balance. There’s never a time when the screen would look too cluttered with entities, allowing you to easily assess your situation even at the most hectic moments.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Audio - 7/10
All you really need in a good, action-packed game is an excellent set of sound effects and background tracks that can drag you into the excitement. Gestalt: Steam & Cinder has those in spades. However, while these games don’t really need voice acting most of the time, it could use them to get you more engaged with its strong narrative.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Value for Money - 8/10
This game gets great mileage off of its $19.99 selling price. Since scenarios change depending on your actions, there’s a significant amount of replayability to the game. There’s also a substantial grind involved for leveling up, which inflates its value despite the artificial nature of that kind of investment.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Review: Hits Hot and Hits Hard
As someone who’s always up for a nice metroidvania, it was only a matter of time before Gestalt: Steam & Cinder would come to my Steam. Er, I mean hands. Being clickbaited by the gorgeous artworks aside, its gameplay trailer was highly effective at catching the attention of a platformer enthusiast like me (despite my skill issues).
Sure, it wasn’t full of over-the-top mechanics and special effects, but that’s exactly what caught my eye in the first place. That’s because for games that only use such basic features like this, they must have their fundamentals polished to a shine so they can stand out.
So, did Gestalt: Steam & Cinder meet my expectations? Quite so!
As mentioned, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s combat system is very simple. While that is true for many metroidvanias early on, that would often stop being the case after you unlock a few new toys. But that’s not the case for this game. That’s because instead of providing you with entirely new tools to play with as you progress, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder simply improves your versatility.
These upgrades range from extending your combos, making you learn an attack that stomps everything underneath you, to giving you a strong attack you can use right after a combat roll. In each case, they simply add a new move that won’t change the fundamental way you fight. At the end of the day, you will still have to smother your opponent’s face with your sword swings and open new breathing holes in their bodies with your gun.
Not all of those are built equally, however. The upgrades that give you additional hits on your light attacks, for example, are kind of useless. That’s because you’ll rarely get to pull the entire combo off before you need to dodge or reposition yourself.
The simplicity of its combat allows you to focus more on and appreciate the other things Gestalt: Steam & Cinder offers. One of these is the game’s incredibly well-designed and balanced visuals. Sure, it lacks the eye-popping action animations that some of you may be looking for, but being able to keep track of close to every single thing that’s happening on screen is a real blessing.
Yes, that includes its lack of voice acting; a common deficiency among metroidvanias, but especially noticeable in Gestalt: Steam & Cinder due to its good story.
But this also allows us to notice the game’s issues much more readily.
If there’s a word that can summarize Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s shortcomings, it would be "inconvenience." That is, they serve more like annoying parts of the game instead of being downright blunders.
For example, the lack of prominent visual aids for hidden areas means that you’ll often encounter them by pure accident rather than by active effort. There’s also the game’s strange choice of separating fast travel points from checkpoints, the surprisingly large level gaps every level starts with, and the annoying crafting system that requires you to obtain materials you might have missed in your dungeon run.
There are also some minor bugs, such as the Einherjar boss getting stuck in a walking animation (allowing you to wail on it the entire time), and some dialogues being assigned to the wrong character.
Fortunately, those issues are just that; annoyances. It doesn’t take much away from the experience unless you really, really hate walking between checkpoints. The visuals are pleasing, the story is gripping, and the gameplay is smooth and intimate.
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is a great game that everybody who likes metroidvanias should consider.
Pros of Gestalt: Steam & Cinder
| Things Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Got Right |
|---|
|
Accommodating Combat Engaging Story |
Accommodating Combat
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s combat loop can basically be summed up with "Slap enemy with sword, dodge when it attacks. Shoot when necessary.” Regardless of the new moves you unlock, that loop remains largely the same.
This simplicity allows the game to fine-tune its other aspects to a tee. No death in Gestalt: Steam & Cinder ever feels unfair since the combat is simple enough that you can only blame yourself for every loss.
Engaging Story
While giving praise to the game’s story is pretty difficult without spoiling anything, it becomes much easier when you remember that the vast majority of action platformers focus on defeating a well-defined "evil." This is also true for Gestalt: Steam & Cinder. But, its definition of "evil" is quite convoluted due to the machinations that happen away from the protagonist’s eyes.
This vagueness gives Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s story a lot of drama and suspense; a welcome change from the cut-and-dry hero formula.
Cons of Gestalt: Steam & Cinder
| Things That Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Can Improve |
|---|
|
Inconvenient Checkpoints Bothersome Level Scaling |
Inconvenient Checkpoints
Normally, checkpoints allow players to either zoom around the map, recover their health and renewable consumables, or save their game. Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s checkpoints also function similarly. However, there are a few catches:
First, the ability to fast travel was separated from checkpoints that allow you to rest and save your game. They are also oftentimes located a good distance away from each other. Lastly, for some reason, main hubs often don’t them located within their areas, necessitating a bit of annoying travel time.
This often leads to short, annoying walks from one checkpoint to another just to get around the map. While, sure, they usually aren’t separated by several areas’ worth of holding your joystick in one direction, the entire experience adds up after a dozen or so trips.
Bothersome Level Scaling
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s action roll is pretty overpowered. It has so many invincibility frames that it makes dodging attacks trivial (as long as you mind your stamina). In other words, you can simply dance around many of the enemies you will encounter.
Does that make the game easy? In a vacuum, that’s definitely so. However, dodging isn’t the only thing you can do in an action platformer, right? You also have to fight enemies while you’re at it. Naturally, that also means leveling up to match every new area you enter. Unfortunately, the amount of levels you’ll have to catch up on is always pretty staggering.
If you simply pass through every area once while fighting every enemy you encounter, the game will repeatedly reach points where the average level for that stage is much higher than yours. Since your upgrades are directly correlated to your player level, you won’t have immediate access to the combat improvements that would allow you to at least deal with targets at a reasonable pace.
What this ends up doing is that most of your early experience per stage will be a troublesome loop of whacking at enemies while hoping they don’t take a defensive stance to overextend your stay, or several minutes grinding just to meet the steeper averages on following stages.
Not that I have an issue with grinding...
Is Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Worth It?
Worth A Lot Of Bills
You get a lot of mileage for the $19.99 you spend on this game. It has an engaging story, intuitive and simple combat, a surprising amount of depth with its limited items, and a good deal of replayability. Sure, it’s not rife with flashy, over-the-top special effects and intense, action-packed boss fights, but that gives the experience a more intimate feel as if your character is an extension of your own body.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$19.99 |
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder FAQ
Does Gestalt: Steam & Cinder have coop?
Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is a purely single-player game. Feel free to backseat your friend trying to play the game, though! Just kidding.
Is Gestalt: Steam & Cinder difficult?
While Gestalt: Steam & Cinder’s skill floor is definitely low, its skill ceiling is also quite high. That’s because bullets aren’t instantaneous, infinite, and uniform. You’ll have to gather enough energy to fire bullets, aim manually, and decide which bullet to use whenever the chance presents itself.
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Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Product Information
 | |
| Title | GESTALT: STEAM & CINDER |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 16, 2024 |
| Developer | Metamorphosis Games |
| Publisher | Fireshine Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC(Steam), Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Metroidvania, Platformer |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Official Website |
