1 Searching without wasting hours
Fragile walls hide secrets across hundreds of intricate rooms. Attacking every surface in every room would technically find all of them and would also be a miserable way to spend an evening.
A better filter is architecture. Search where the room shape suggests space you cannot reach, such as a dead end that is longer than it needs to be, a corridor that stops just short of a boundary, or a chamber whose visible exits do not account for its size.
2 ESPer abilities are the second toolkit
Alongside reclaiming your stolen equipment you awaken mysterious ESPer abilities. Those are listed separately from your gear, which suggests they are a parallel set of options rather than upgrades to the same ones.
Whenever a new one appears, the productive move is to spend a few minutes trying it against the environment as well as against enemies. In this genre a power introduced as combat frequently turns out to be traversal, and the reverse.
That habit also feeds the searching advice above. A new ability is a good reason to revisit the rooms whose blank neighbouring space you noted earlier.
3 Spending at the shops
You meet shopkeepers and other denizens of Tutone and can barter for information or equipment. Those two purchases behave very differently and are worth separating in your head.
| Buying | Worth it when |
|---|---|
| Equipment | A specific fight or hazard is stopping you |
| Information | You have spent more than one session lost |
Buying information feels like cheating and is not. In a world built around hidden paths, an answer bought from a local is exactly the kind of shortcut the fiction supports, and it costs less than an hour of wall attacking.
4 Studying creatures, not just killing them
The premise is that Cosmobreeders travel to forgotten worlds to study alien creatures. The radio team supplying intel on every enemy you discover is the game handing you that role back after the crash took your equipment.
Practically, calling in about a creature before fighting it converts a trial and error encounter into an informed one. Across dozens of unique foes, that is a large amount of saved time and health.
It is also the difference between playing this as a generic action platformer and playing it as the game it is presenting itself as, which matters when the story is delivered through dozens of hand crafted cutscenes and the people you rescue.
5 Sixty achievements as a checklist
Sixty achievements in a metroidvania of this size almost certainly enumerate discoveries: creatures met, comrades rescued, secrets found, bosses beaten. That makes the list a completion map rather than a set of stunts.
The efficient way to use it is on a second pass rather than during the first. Reading it early spoils the exploration that the game is mostly made of, while reading it after the credits tells you precisely what you walked past.
Since Steam Cloud saves are supported and the install is only 200 megabytes, coming back weeks later to finish the list costs nothing.
6 Playing it in English
English is the only supported language, and unusually for an action game that affects play rather than only presentation. The radio intel that makes fights manageable arrives as dialogue.
If English is not comfortable for you, the game remains completable, since a metroidvania can always be solved by exploration and reflexes. What you lose is the assistance layer, which makes it a noticeably harder game than the developers designed.
Search walls where the map shows blank space rather than attacking everything, and revisit those spots whenever a new ESPer ability appears. Buy equipment when a specific obstacle blocks you and buy information when you have been lost for a session. Call the radio about creatures before fighting them, since studying them is both the premise and the practical advantage. Save the 60 achievement list for a second pass, and remember there is no demo to test the English only presentation.
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