Supraworld early access review: A puzzle adventure that does too little with too much

Dayten Rose, 8 September 2025

Supraworld starts slow. Maybe that’s why I want to start this review as swiftly as possible: it triggered my motion sickness; its open world is thoughtfully ordered but poorly modeled; it struggles to keep its promises. Supraworld may still reach its potential—this is an early access release, after all, amounting to the game’s opening act—but it makes a bad first impression.

It’s already a game with lots to do and lots to talk about. But to get into any of it, we’ll first need to grapple with its engine.

Even in screenshots, the first thing I noticed about Supraworld was the dazzle of Unreal Engine 5—I mean, the very literal glare of the engine’s mandatory Lumen global illumination system. This GPU-eating process attempts to mirror the actual physics of reflection and diffraction, along with quirks of human vision such as the adjustment of the pupils between a dark space and a light one.

Truly, graphics are the least interesting place to start talking about a game. But I fought UE5 almost the whole time I was trying to play the game behind it. Some of that was tinkering to get it to a frame rate and field-of-view that didn’t make me want to hurl (an issue that, glancing at forums and Steam reviews, is not at all uncommon). But the engine also clashes with Supraworld’s fundamental game design, impairing my ability to seek, scan, and closely appraise.

Supraworld casts the player as a meeple in a world constructed by household bric-a-brac: playing cards, safety pins, lots and lots of wood blocks. It isn’t recognizably a child’s bedroom, or any other room of a house. Meeples have the run of the place, tiny castles and all, with no human logic ordering anything. This is how Supraworld sets the board for its take on an open-world puzzler, borrowing language and mechanics from immersive sims (think Deus Ex right up to Breath of the Wild) that allow radically divergent approaches to problems. Broadly, games in that tradition emphasize either character progression or mastery of the world. Supraworld, a straightforward metroidvania, might have benefited from adopting one of these strategies, but so far it slips into some gap between the two.

At the start, your character has very little at their disposal. They can’t even walk. The first action you perform is grabbing an upgrade that lets you move, followed by one that lets you jump, and so on for your fundamental modes of interaction. I can imagine how this steady drip of mechanics might lay the groundwork for a game in which new abilities continually reshape my relationship to the challenges presented in the open world. Once the first of these abilities comes online, movement remains satisfying (if overly technical) as the game goes on.

However, progress is always strictly defined. When I see a knee-high gap in the architecture of the level, it’s not an invitation to creatively consider the powers at my disposal. It’s just the game checking to see if I’ve gotten the “crouch” upgrade. No revelations await. Individual puzzles scattered around the open world are genuinely genius in how they exploit certain fringe mechanics, but those ideas are never added to your toolkit, so to speak. Superficial elements—the clink of coins, the chime of discovering a secret area—threaten to drive momentum all on their own. But with little variation between platforming segments, locked doors, and narrow ledges, they can only do so much.

Combat, too, is hit or miss. A handful of encounters, specifically boss fights, require creative use of the environment. But linear combat upgrades (+1 damage, +1 crit chance) quickly outpace thinky options. What’s more, these numerical upgrades cannibalize more inventive ones as rewards for optional challenges, where game-changing upgrades would throw off the intended progression, with the result that combat becomes the primary means of opposition even along the game’s golden path—further complicated by the lack of enemy variety. Even in early access, it seems to run out of ideas.

Supraworld, then, is in a bind. It leans on combat to fill gaps left by its puzzles, but can’t offer meaningful improvements to either. One solution, favored by sandbox games, is to realize the world so fully that abilities aren’t needed in the first place. Baldur’s Gate 3 may be the best recent example of this: whatever challenge you might be facing, there’s never anything stopping you from climbing a stack of 50 boxes, or dragging an explosive barrel from the next town over, or trivializing combat through masterful manipulation of enemy AI.

By contrast, most objects in Supraworld aren’t movable, and it’s hard to even tell what is. Everything is equally shiny and articulate. I lost three full hours in the early game because, in a system of static, interconnected gears, I failed to notice the one gear that could be pushed. (It doesn’t help that pushing things in this game means running facefirst into them.)

Supraworld does attempt to solve this problem of illegibility, which I’ve neglected to mention so as to avoid spoiling the game’s info-based progression track. Some of the rewards in the early game are “Solver’s Handbook” pages, a loose set of clues for parsing the game. Like the unique platforming and combat abilities, these offer the potential for mastery of the world through a greater understanding of it. The first of these pages alone ensured that I never got truly lost in puzzle-dense areas.

Others range from unhelpful to downright untrue. Take the assertion that “pointless decoration is not really a thing in this world.” This is a confident statement about intentionality—I just don’t know what to do with it. I don’t doubt that everything serves some function, but many objects simply serve as boundaries, structural elements, and, yes, decorations, which have nothing to do with solving puzzles. Another note, that “most people have helpful things to say,” just doesn’t bear out. Most NPCs placed near a puzzle say something to the effect of, “There’s a puzzle here.” Many only exist to engage in a style of humor that I describe as funny, I guess: statements are made in the shape of jokes, often at the player character’s expense, but lack substance. A meeple protesting in front of a candy factory says, “Down with sugar! It makes me fat!” And the meeple is… fat! Is that helpful? Is it even a joke?

I keep coming back to the other entries in this series. Supraball self-described as “the birth of a new genre,” loudly decrying creaky old sports games in the way that Dawn dish soap decries competing brands. Supraland’s Steam bio proclaims it as a “mix of Portal, Zelda, and Metroid,” three of the greatest franchises ever made. Reading the Solver’s Handbook, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m reading an extension of the marketing copy. And I feel similarly when I look across the glossy world: boisterous, but with little to back it up.

Supraworld has nothing but room to grow. And if Supraland is any indication, the developer has the stuff for it. I peeped the demo after completing the early access and found it an absolute delight, with a visually distinct world and early game upgrades that whirred with potential. Candidly, Supraworld’s developer last year told Rock Paper Shotgun that the main reason for launching the early access now was to cover its production costs. But if you love this series, I think you’re better off checking out Supraland and its DLCs. This one isn’t ready yet.