I love Metroidvania games a lot. I find myself wishlisting a lot of them when I see them pop up either in my inbox or on my Steam recommendations list. As such, Clockwork Ambrosia was on my radar before its release date. However, I must admit I’m a little disappointed, having played the finished product.

Before we get to my complaints, Clockwork Ambrosia puts you in the role of Iris, an explorer in a steampunk/futuristic world. Iris crashes her airship in an unknown area, leading to an adventure she never would have expected.

The main mechanic of Clockwork Ambrosia is that Iris gets 4 weapons that can be customized with various parts. These parts change how the guns fire and work, with some parts offering great benefits at some form of cost. In addition, you’ll acquire relics and gear across the various areas that give you new traversal options, like any other Metroidvania.

If you lose all of your health, you have limited respawns in the room you died in. After those respawns are up, it takes you to the last save point you rested at. This seems like a forgiving system, but this is where one of my major problems with Clockwork Ambrosia pops up. Iris’ options for healing are very limited, which leads to a very harsh difficulty curve.

Iris has her regular health, along with a singular armor point. She can acquire more armor as time goes on, but in the beginning, you are limited to a single point. By defeating enemies, you can charge your repair tool, which allows you to restore your armor. However, the tool requires you to kill a lot of enemies to refill it, and enemies themselves don’t drop health-restoring items outright. As such, at least in the early game, damage is only restored at save points.

Couple this issue with the fact that Iris can’t shoot vertically or at a diagonal, and you’ll find that you are taking damage from enemies that are hard to hit laterally. I wouldn’t mind this so much if the game had difficulty options or accessibility features to adjust enemy damage etc, but neither of these things is an option. For fans of hard games that like the challenge of it, this will probably be appealing, but I know a lot of people who will bounce off the game hard because of this.

In fact, the lack of vertical or diagonal aiming makes combat feel frustratingly clunky in general. Maybe I have played too many Metroidvanias with directional aiming recently, but this feels more like playing an early Mega-Man title with Metroidvania elements, rather than actively fulfilling the goal Clockwork Ambrosia seems to be aiming for.

With that in mind, I really like the visual art style, as well as the soundtrack. The storyline is interesting too, and that was what kept me interested as I got increasingly frustrated with the combat. The modular weapon mechanic is really cool and versatile as well, so I definitely recommend this to anyone who doesn’t mind putting up with the clunky combat.

Clockwork Ambrosia isn’t going to hit the top of my favorite Indies for 2026 list. However, I see the vision, and I know that the developers care a lot about what they’ve created. It might not be for me, but I know that there are probably quite a few of you reading this who are going to like Clockwork Ambrosia.

A PC Review Copy of Clockwork Ambrosia was provided by OI Games for the purposes of this review.

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Clockwork Ambrosia

$19.99 USD

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Gorgeous Pixel Art
• Interesting weapon mod system
• Large world to explore
• Interesting storyline

Cons

• Harsh difficulty curve
• Clunky combat
• a few optimization problems