Inayah: Life After Gods Review
Inayah: Life After Gods is a Metroidvania that shows promise, but misses the mark.
Inayah: Life After Gods is a Metroidvania that shows promise, but misses the mark.
Inayah: Life After Gods is a 2D action-platformer developed by ExoGenesis Studios and published by Headup Games. Players will explore a richly detailed post-apocalyptic world, fighting a variety of bosses along the way. With its hand-drawn animations and Metroidvania gameplay, Inayah aims to deliver an action-packed adventure.
Inayah is an orphan who must search for her lost tribe to learn about her roots. Hers is a brutal world, as clans battle for control of the ruins of a once-advanced civilization. Player choices lead to multiple endings, so your interactions matter. The writing in the game is passable, but it’s not helped by the lackluster line readings of the voice actors.
Inayah: Life After Gods is a Metroidvania that shows promise, but misses the mark.
For combat, Inayah uses gauntlets that transform into three weapons—blades, fists, and flail—that each behave differently in combat. While the fists and flail are powerful weapons, I was frustrated by both and used the quicker blade most of the time. A skill tree further modifies each mode’s combat style, but no amount of changes made the fists or flail more palatable for me to use.
As a Metroidvania, Inayah blends its combat and exploration. The world is vast, with diverse biomes that are rewarding to explore thanks to their many hidden secrets. Each new transformation you find for Inayah’s weapon, her gauntlets, also grants a traversal ability that makes more exploration possible. Though it’s an interesting idea, in practice, it feels unwieldy to need to switch weapon modes as you fly through the air when you need to trigger multiple different abilities to reach a target.
The game has a wide array of enemies, including over 20 unique bosses. The bosses are the best part of the game. I appreciated the varied design of the bosses and the unique challenge each provided.
For me, maps are one of the most important features a Metroidvania should get right. Inayah’s maps helpfully label obstacles and objectives, which is a big plus. Where they fail is in their design, where players must contend with two views, one a zoomed-in, detailed view of a single room, and the other a zoomed out but vague representation of all the rooms you’ve seen. Having to switch between views to plot my routes is irritating, at best. The game would have been far better served by a system that simply lets you zoom in and out of a fully detailed map, like most Metroidvanias. The best use of a two map system is if the detailed map is restricted to a single biome, and the world map serves to show how biomes are connected.
Inayah: Life After Gods is a Metroidvania that shows promise, but misses the mark.
Visually, Inayah stands out with its hand-drawn 2D art and animations, that create its vibrant and immersive world. The environments are colorful and detailed. As you move, a parallax scrolling effect gives them a little depth. However, the game’s flat lighting presents a missed opportunity to give things a little more oomph. At least the character and enemy designs are interesting and distinct, with color palettes that help them pop from the background.
Inayah: Life After Gods is a Metroidvania that shows promise, but misses the mark.
Inayah: Life After Gods presents interesting ideas with its combat dynamics, but doesn’t fully execute on the potential of the three weapon system. I wouldn’t recommend the game based on its story, though the game’s art goes a long way to presenting a compelling world. For me, that’s not enough to push a Metroidvania over the top. The game would benefit from further refinement to its systems to fully realize its ambitions.
Inayah: Life After Gods is available now on Steam. Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox platform versions are planned for later in 2025.
Overall Score: 6/10
Played on: Steam Deck
