In handsome metroidvania Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists you are a dryad fighting the corpse of capitalism

I have measured out my life with T.S. Eliot quotes

Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists opens with paired quotes from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Mad Max: Fury Road - a blend of influences that would typically get you kicked out of the Creative Writing Club for being simultaneously too fancy and too obvious, but the game beyond the epigraph looks pretty swish.

It's "a compact and high-density Metroidvania, with a focus on sequence-breaking and playing things out of order". It uses a square aspect display ratio calibrated to give wizened Game Boy enthusiasts the shakes, and is made up of 200 single-screen rooms that "slot into the larger puzzle-box of the world". Also, you play a thorn witch who looks a bit like 1950s Tinkerbell, with a touch of Betty Boop. Here's a trailer.

And here's some blurb:

Alruna is a dryad in a dying world - a spirit of life in the land of the dead. The earth is sucked dry. There is only The Sprawl. Poor, bedraggled skele-men dot the Wasteland of the Necro-Industrialists and shuffle endlessly back and forth in a toiling mockery of life. But are they the real enemy? Or do the skeletons suffer just as much as the dryads under the domination of the Necro-Industrialists?

And salvation? Is it possible? Dead men yearn for Heaven. But the dead can only dig...

I've just given the Steam demo a shot, and this is a very assured production. You get a chargeable jump, a dash move and a slide by default, plus a choice of weapons and items plucked from the crevices of a world that includes four temples (plus a possible fifth "secret" temple, which isn't that secret given that they've mentioned it on the Steam page).

The music is pretty stylish, and there are familiar puzzle setups such as flipping switches to make certain platforms dematerialise while others grow solid. Power-ups include exploding mushrooms, magic vines and electro-plants. It's packing in a fair bit, though the square aspect room-based format makes everything feel quite tidy.

Aside from platform-puzzle gambits, we can expect hidden minigames, "a star-crossed enemies-to-lovers romance with a rival adventurer" and several story endings. It's got a pretty unvarnished anti-capitalist thing going on, without (so far) being didactic. One friendly character you meet complains about "endless progress and infinite growth". There is definitely scope for more Wasteland quotation here but hopefully, they'll restrain themselves.

The full game is out on 26th September. Developers Neckbolt are also working on pocket-sized trick-or-treat platformer October Panic. Their past releases include Yono And The Celestial Elephants, which Alec (RPS in peace) deemed an "almost absurdly wholesome Zeldalike", corpse girl adventure Belladona, which seems a little less wholesome, and Molly Medusa: Queen Of Spit, in which you can walk on walls and turn things to stone. A studio to keep an eye on, probably.

If you like the aesthetic and ambience here, but could do without the combat, may I suggest trying Everdeep Aurora or perhaps Void Stranger.