Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Sword, pistol and buried secrets

Fighting in Canaan is about mixing your tools. Sword combos charge your pistol, and the gun doubles as a special attack or a way to hit things your blade cannot reach. Around that sit dash, dodge, double-jump and a roll, so staying alive is mostly about moving well and knowing when to disengage.

You spend experience points on new skills in a branching tree, and trade scrap, the city's scrapyard currency, for accessories that tune your build. Enemies respawn when you revisit an area, which keeps fights coming and gives you a steady way to farm scrap between jobs.

Canaan is built for classic metroidvania exploring. New abilities like the double jump and air dash unlock paths that were sealed on your first pass, so an early dead end becomes a shortcut later. An automap with placeable markers keeps you oriented, you can buy maps that reveal where certain items hide, and teleport devices let you jump between distant districts.

The city itself is the reward. You chase a frenzied mutant through the grimy stalls of the Irkallan Black Market, leap across molten pools in the eternal furnace of Fornax, and push into the fathomless Scrap Sea where blood-drunk Raiders prowl for their malignant god.

This is a game that wants you to know what happened. Aletheia starts with a routine job that goes wrong, and the search for a missing man pulls her down into the labyrinth beneath the city, toward a relic said to be infinitely powerful and truths riveted into Canaan's very foundations. The Comitium, the city's corrupt overseers, would rather she did not look.

The tale unfolds through a lot of dialogue and cutscenes, some of them showing events elsewhere in the world, and the pixel art and music carry it beautifully: every district has its own personality, from rain-soaked scrapyards to vaulted marble halls.