Sometimes when you review titles, you come across one that kicks up some old feelings. For example, when I’m playing any Street Fighter game, it harkens back to me on a date at a mall in Annapolis. I should have been paying attention to my date, but I was fixated on a new game called Street Fighter II. It’s a good memory for the wrong dating reasons, but a good memory about video games and my first real experience with SFII.
Those feelings created by that one incident come and go with fighting games. As gamers, we create those types of memories for every great game we dive into and it helps to kick in some energy when a new game of the same type rolls around. Such an incident occurred within the last few weeks, and I’ve been digging into INAYAH – Life After Gods from developer Exogenesis Studios. It features a well-armed female lead going through multi-tiered tunnels of bad guys trying to find upgrades to access the next tier while fending off baddies at the same time. This game kicked up my fond memories of Super Metroid, a game it most certainly was trying to mimic, if not only with its essence.
While it’s a known fact that Super Metroid lives on Mount Olympus of gaming with the other Nintendo gaming Gods, the mere fact that INAYAH – Life After Gods could bring the same style, gameplay purpose, and coolness helped to make it easy to get right into. While not everything was up to Super Metroid-type standards, especially level design and repetitive enemies, the SM style certainly helped its cause when INAYAH bared its weaknesses.
So, sit back, get those arms stretched for some swinging action, and let’s get going on this review of INAYAH – Life After Gods.
Story
The story of Inayah begins with her journey to know more about where she came from and who her people are. Her adventure begins with the death of her teacher, who has kept her safe and growing as a warrior and person, and who guides her to go seek out those she needs to find in order to feel complete.
You play as Inayah and you are on a breadcrumb hunt to figure out what has happened to the world you live in and the different types of tribes that exist within the world. It’s a neat ever-growing world builder that brings together some cool characters, and some sketchy situations and gives way to some fantastically creative bosses.
The story is common in structure but what helps the narrative is the acting and script. I enjoyed the story way more than I thought I would and felt like there was a tremendous amount of effort to put it at the forefront of the gameplay. Sometimes that helps when you’re trying to get gamers used to your game’s world, and it certainly helped in the case of INAYAH – Life After Gods. Since it goes along with a Metroidvania feel, the game did a good job of making the experience seem unique in an over-bloated genre. It certainly hooked and sold me.
Now, about that gameplay…
Gaming with Inayah
Much like I stated at the beginning of this review, INAYAH – Life After Gods feels like a Metroid clone, which isn’t a knock on it at all. It contains a lot of familiar elements of the classic series, and is very complimentary of it, while at the same time keeping its uniqueness driven by the story firmly intact. Let’s dive into its gameplay pieces and parts.
Leveling
A simple word with various meanings. The leveling in INAYAH – Life After Gods is broken down into level design and how you progress within the game. Starting with level design, for the most part, the levels are repetitive in their base structure while giving way to obstacles that make them stylishly unique. What I mean by this is that the levels feel the same from place to place, where you’re climbing up walls, and jumping from platform to platform, all while avoiding enemies. On a grounded, base level the design is repetitive. Does this affect the gameplay? Not really, but what it does is keep the gamer in a confined view, where the decorations in the level might be different but the level is similar from place to place, thus pushing back on feeling progression.
Is that a big deal? After the first or second hour, it feels like progression is a slow process. Getting out of one area is defined by what is going on with the obstacles you’re facing but because that overall structure doesn’t change much, the game feels just a bit draggy. It’s not a big deal but it is noticeable. You always want your players to feel like they’re progressing and to be in awe of the next-level design they have made it to in the game. It also gives the world girth and a hefty dose of personality when level designs can be changed regularly during gameplay.
The genius of games like Super Metroid are how the levels and progression are represented. When you move into a specific boss’ lair in SM, the environment completely changes, the base level changes its structure with gameplay and visuals, and how the environment reacts to the gameplay mechanics shifts. It feels like a completely different part of the game. It also reinforces that the player has progressed to the next part, which helps motivate the gamer to keep pushing forward.
This all sounds silly but if you’re connecting your player with the game through story and characters, then you also need to show them that the world is huge and that they’re doing a good job with progression.
Now, all this said, the levels are gorgeous with how they work and react with the player. There are a lot of hidden pieces and parts to each level, moments where you’re going to see beautiful and haunting art come to life, and the way the levels work is stylish and unique to each other. There’s a lot of positive when you hit the style and form of each level’s new area. Major kudos should be given to the art director and their crew, who built one of the most gorgeous games I’ve seen so far in 2025. I didn’t expect much out of this game with art, but it certainly delivered in level design and with characters. It feels like you’re playing an anime that was drawn with love and care. It’s a gorgeous game from levels to characters.
Leveling – Character Edition
While the level design of the game has a balance of familiar and unique, the backend leveling for Inayah is something to behold. For the most part, you’re driven by the front-end weaponry of Inayah. She wields swords, flails, and fists in this game. Each one can be switched to instantly, and each one serves its purpose when traversing levels.
On the backend of those weapons lies a fun and complicated enhancement and skills tree. The enhancements come in the form of implants for Inayah. The implants help Inayah get through levels and add unique mechanics to her movements. I like that this is a separate piece from the skills tree in the game.
On the skills tree side, it’s mainly about Inayah’s weaponry. You can upgrade skills through the collection of rocky gold material in the game. These skills can give Inayah different attack abilities with each weapon, some related directly to the weapon or just having the weapon equipped. The skills can be huge downward blows to enemies or something as simple as upgrading Inayah’s health. The skills tree is vast with every weapon, which means you’ll be working on it for a while. It also means that it will create motivation to explore levels to find more of that rock material and keep you engaged with looking under every nook and cranny of the game. In short, the leveling helps the game in many ways, and it keeps the game fresh, if not more entertaining.
Sometimes you need a purpose to keep you going, one outside of the story, and leveling helps to fill that void.
Controlling the gameplay
While levels and leveling are fun and such, actually controlling Inayah through those levels has to be good to make this game work. The mechanics that Exogenesis Studios built for INAYAH – Life After Gods are flawless. Navigating Inayah through multi-tiered levels, while taking out enemies is as easy as a Sunday morning.
The developers did a great job of making the controls seem like they weren’t there. You want that to be a ‘thing’ with a Metroidvania. You want gamers to concentrate on goals, quests, and enemies without thinking about how to properly navigate a jump. In that respect, the game excels with its controls and how non-existent they feel during gameplay.
The game works better with a controller, as it was truly built with classic platforming in mind, but regardless, it’s still a smooth set of controls and mechanics with Inayah’s movement.
Enemies
While the controls are nice and not an obstacle to enjoying the gameplay, the enemies help to make those controls even better. First and foremost, the enemies that you encounter during gameplay look and react just as artsy as the rest of the game. They’re detailed, mean, and sometimes provide wonderful obstacles for Inayah’s progression. The only big issue I have with the enemies is their repetitiveness and how spaced out they feel in the environments. I know those are two competing statements, but both are valid.
You’ll find that a lot of the levels contain the same type of enemies as you go through them. They do change with the environments and with boss progression, but they end up repeating more than they don’t. For example, during the early stages of the game, you’ll come across about 2-3 different plant monsters. You’ll find those same monsters repeatedly on the early levels until you take down their boss and progress forward. They didn’t bring a lot of variety and the enemies tend to go those repetitive routes as you change from level to level, even when you take on new bosses. The additional obstacles, such as spikes you have to jump over or objects you must avoid to curve damage help to circumvent some of that repetitiveness but the repeating enemies create a mundane atmosphere that drowns out some of that creativity the game is trying to emit.
The enemies in the game also feel very spaced out (distance). You’ll go through several spots of a level where the enemies appear maybe once and then you won’t see more until down the road. While this does go with the Metroidvania style of enemy placement, Super Metroid did this as well, it just feels like there aren’t enough enemies to fill a space. It’s nit-picky, I know, but the gameplay does feel like this. I would have liked a bit more enemies and chaos during my level wandering.
The redeeming part of the enemies in INAYAH – Life After Gods are the bosses. I felt like an incredible amount of effort was put into creating the bosses in this game and giving them some narrative context. They were superb in design and execution, and they are a good motivator when trying to push through this game. For example, you’ll run into a boss not too far out of the gate. There is a plant boss that has a tribe’s person wrapped up in its vines. While the boss is easy to take down, its personality after the initial takedown shows the effort put into this area of the game. It keeps a watchful eye on you but doesn’t dare to rear its head again. It’s cool and artsy. Anyway, the bosses are wonderful to go up against, and they become harder and more complicated as you progress in the game.
Overall, while the above review of the gameplay might seem overly critical, the gameplay is good. While it has its flaws, you’ll be locked in at times with how much fun it is, what Metroid memories come from playing it, and how nice the story is as a whole. It’s a good game to play through and an even better game to come back to now and then. The art style, narrative, and backend execution should give you plenty of reason to try it out.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
INAYAH – Life After Gods from developer Exogenesis Studios is a fun and flawed metroidvania adventure. Its narrative is quite good and purposeful, the art is out of this world visually amazing, and the backend design is complicated, as it is motivating. The repetitiveness of enemies and level design drag the gameplay down a bit but for the most part the game still delivers a worthy adventure.
