Stepping into an indie genre dominated by heavyweights like Hollow Knight and the Ori series, Morkull Ragast’s Rage is up against some difficult competition in the increasingly saturated area of Metroidvania platformers. And while Spanish studio Disaster Game’s debut effort may make some admirable attempts at standing out with its hand-drawn art direction and foray into fourth-wall humour, sadly it remains little more than the wrapping on a mediocre package that struggles with a lack of polish and distinctiveness in its core ideas and direction.

Morkull Ragast’s Rage is a 2D Metroidvania platformer published by Seleca Play and developed by Disaster Games. It follows the player controlling Morkull, the god of death and darkness and former lord of the Ragast, a fantasy realm from which he has been usurped by Galat, the god of war. The player must progress through the Ragast, meeting allies and getting the keys back to Morkull’s castle to defeat Galat and reclaim the throne. An additional wrinkle is that Morkull is self-aware of the fact he is in a videogame. He sees reclaiming the Ragast as his first step in thwarting the game’s developers and escaping into the real world where he intends to enact a plan of world domination.

That might sound like a fun metafictional videogame twist on a Pinky and the Brain-type Saturday morning cartoon plot, but it’s little more than narrative framing on a game that makes a mixed first impression. After a brief introduction, that involves Morkull threatening to kill puppies if the player does not complete the game, Morkull Ragast’s Rage’s visuals do initially give it a sense of distinctiveness. The hand-drawn cartoon aesthetic is interesting, and its character models, particularly those later in the game like fireball-esque cats and spiralling birds in medieval helms, are sometimes imbued with a degree of creativity. While the first explorable area never extends beyond being a drab purple cave, later levels become far more interesting in their vistas, particularly when it comes to its background art and the sense of scale it intermittently alludes to.

In contrast, though, all the apparent attention to detail and care in the art direction does not extend to any of the game’s menus and maps, leaving much of the UI feeling like placeholders. At times, they feel so unfinished to the point of lacking usability, ranging from the upgrade tree whose selection cursor is near impossible to see, to the fast travel map that could have been made in Microsoft PowerPoint. The exploration map, while marginally better, lacks the Metroidvania necessity of helping players both clearly identify where they are and what paths and dead ends they can return to later. This sometimes made exploration cumbersome and frustrating. In one particularly aagravating instance early on, I spent almost an hour roaming around the first area trying to figure out how to progress because the map didn’t make it clear I still had part of a room yet to explore.

The game’s lack of polish also bleeds into how mechanics are introduced to the player. While Ragast’s Rage contains many of the Metroidvania-platformer staples like wall-jumping, objects that replenish your jumps midair and new movement abilities that let you access new areas, several of these are never clearly explained to the player. One early upgrade I received showed me the wrong button inputs to activate it, leading to several moments of intense frustration as I tried different controller inputs to progress. It is in places like this that the newness of Disaster Games as a studio feels the most apparent, and it seriously detracts from the rest of the game’s presentation by adding a sense of cheapness to the overall experience.

This struggle to find a polished personality extends to the game’s poor writing and narrative frame. Despite its fourth wall breaks being one of the game’s big selling points, and the fact metafiction is increasingly common and entertaining in video games, the writing and humour in Morkull Ragast’s Rage rarely extends beyond the easiest and cheapest gags. The premise of an evil character trying to escape their video game prison is a fun one that has potential, but Morkull simply spends the entire runtime doing asides that make Deadpool-esque jabs like ‘now that’s just lazy writing’ feel clever by comparison. Indeed, outside of the dialogue and a few visuals, its fourth wall breaking plays very little role in the game until its final moments, and by then it feels not only undercooked but also too little too late. The Deadpool comparison is also apt in how the game has a teenage boy’s sensibility of what’s funny, including expletives and a button that, as far as I can tell, was solely dedicated to activating an animation of Morkull pissing.