Soulchain hands you one grappling hook and locks the world behind it

You wake up as a lost little soul somewhere in the Afterlife, and the only thing you own is yourself. The soul detaches, flies out, catches a surface and pulls — a grappling hook that happens to also be the character you are playing. Everything else follows from that. There is no jump doing the heavy lifting and no dash to bail you out of a bad arc. There is aim, fire, anchor, swing, release, and the moment of the release is where most of the skill lives.

The developer’s claim is that the same hook works two ways at once, and that part is worth taking seriously. Used slowly it is a surveying tool: anchor, hang, look around, reposition, cross a room one attachment at a time. Used fast it is a trick system, where you let go at the top of a swing and spend the momentum on distance you have not really earned. Same input, two different games, separated only by nerve — which is what people mean when they say a toolkit reads from beginner to pro.

Around that sit hundreds of hand-crafted challenges rather than generated ones, and area-specific mechanics — moving platforms, portals — that change what an anchor point is worth without changing the verb. A portal is not a new ability. It is your existing swing ending up somewhere you did not plan for.

Then there is the Night, a brutal parallel world for the bravest little souls, sitting in the same build as a set of assist options that tune the difficulty down. Two dials pointing in opposite directions, shipped together, which suggests the developer has already thought about the full spread of people who will open this.

Does Spidey’s Web-Swinging Make You Feel Like Spider-Man? argues that swinging sells its fantasy through speed, animation and flow, and that the ease of it is engineered rather than incidental. Soulchain is the harder version of that problem. A Spider-Man game can quietly help you find an anchor point off-screen; a precision platformer where the hook is your own body cannot lie to you about what it caught. The flow has to come out of geometry the player can actually see.

Sequence Breaking with Toki Tori 2 nearly describes this game’s pitch outright: a world gated by knowledge instead of keys, items or new abilities, where skipping ahead is a legitimate way to explore rather than a cheat. Soulchain says the same — areas open because of what you have worked out about the hook, not because of what you picked up. The catch is that giving up item gates means giving up the schedule too. You cannot pace someone by handing them the grapple in hour four when they had it in minute one, so the pacing has to be carried entirely by the shape of the level.

What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special covers the last piece, and it is a sharper problem here than it was there. Celeste handed out real help without shaming anyone and without blurring what the intended climb was. In a knowledge-gated world, execution is not only difficulty — it is also the key to the door. Loosen the wrong dial and you have not made the climb kinder, you have opened the map early.

Soulchain is made by moraguma, self-published, and listed as coming soon for Windows and Linux under Adventure and Indie. It is single-player, with full controller support, Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud — a solo project that has ticked the boxes solo projects usually skip.

The rest of the store page is the Metroidvania promise: a non-linear Afterlife organised by seasons, a cast of characters with their own journeys to help along, and collectible lost souls hidden in the corners. Those collectibles carry more weight than usual, because in a game with no item gates they are one of the few remaining reasons to go back into a room you have already solved.

If the appeal is a world you have to earn with movement, Project Ants is the one to read next — another Metroidvania built on traversal, except its kingdom opens when you get new legs, where Soulchain’s opens when you work out what the legs you already have can reach.