The metroidvania is a genre of ceilings and floors. The Gilded Depths abolishes both. Your diver-automaton, the Gilt, swims — and everything the genre normally does with gravity, Lanternfish Games does with buoyancy, current and light.
Weightless, not aimless
Early on, movement is deliberately heavy: you sink, you drift, you claw for handholds against the current. Each upgrade — a ballast core, a propulsion fin, a pressure shell for the crushing lower zones — retunes not just where you can go but how it feels to get there. By the endgame you are riding thermal vents across the map like a swallow riding wind, and the transformation is earned inch by inch.
Light is the second system. Your lantern draws curious fauna and repels the things with too many eyes, and entire zones toggle between safe and lethal depending on how brightly you dare to burn. It is an elegant risk dial that the level design exploits mercilessly.
The dark spots
Bosses are the weak link — a handful of patterns stretched across too many encounters — and the story of the drowned mint you are exploring stays fashionably oblique to the end. I wanted one room, just one, where the game said something plainly.
Verdict
Small complaints against a big achievement. The Gilded Depths takes the genre's oldest pleasure — the map slowly surrendering its secrets — and makes it strange and beautiful again. At this price, not diving in is the only mistake.
