WOLFHOUND Is a 2026 WWII Pixel-Art Metroidvania. The Year It's Actually Built In Is 1988 — and the Schematic Is Blaster Master.
Bit Kid's pixel-art infiltration of Dr. Steiner's mutant-infested island ships this year on PS5, Switch, and PC. Every review will call it a Metroidvania. They'll be right. What they'll miss is that it isn't Metroidvania-as-genre — it's Metroidvania as one specific 1988 Sunsoft cartridge, redrawn by a studio that knows where every load-bearing beam in the original was.
The quickest thing to say is that WOLFHOUND is good. Captain Chuck "Wolfhound" Rossetti is a one-man Allied infiltration run through ten interconnected areas on an uncharted Axis island, scavenging ammunition against soldiers and mutants, uncovering Dr. Steiner's laboratory tech and turning it back on him. The moment-to-moment feel is tight. The pixel art is assertive. The soundtrack nods to mid-period Konami — you'd believe it if somebody said Super C's composer cameo'd on track seven. The review verdict, stripped of the thing I actually want to argue: this is a good game and you should play it. RC score below.
Now the argument. I want to stop talking about WOLFHOUND and talk about the schematic. Open any recent reviewer's lede and they'll reach for Metroid (1986) or Symphony of the Night (1997) as the reference. Those reaches are lazy — Metroid is the category, not the comp. The comp is Blaster Master (Sunsoft, NES, 1988). WOLFHOUND is built inside that 38-year-old game's bones, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
"The comp is Blaster Master."— Lumenforce
One — the vertical-map grammar. Blaster Master was one of the first home-console metroidvanias to build level progression around vertical climb gated by movement upgrade, rather than horizontal exploration gated by item key. You couldn't reach Area 3 until you had the dive upgrade; you couldn't clear Area 5 until you had the wall-crawl. WOLFHOUND inherits this literally — the ten interconnected areas of Dr. Steiner's island are threaded by vertical gate dependencies. Play half an hour and you're doing the same thing Jason Frudnick was doing to find his frog in 1988: climbing up before you can go out.
Two — the two-layer pacing split. Blaster Master's single design innovation — the one the genre then forgot for decades — was that every area had two traversal registers: the wide-screen vehicle/open-world mode (the SOPHIA tank) and the zoomed-in top-down dungeon interior (on-foot Jason). The camera snapped and the music changed when you transitioned. WOLFHOUND does this. It doesn't have a tank — it has infiltration routes versus bunker-interior stealth rooms. The transitions are instantaneous camera-snaps. If you played Blaster Master before you were fifteen, the second time WOLFHOUND does the snap you will say it out loud.
Three — the mutated-boss / mad-scientist arc. Blaster Master ended in a mutated boss chamber, an alien-biology-mad-science framing that felt incongruous coming out of its pixel-military chassis. Everyone remembers how weird that was. WOLFHOUND takes the framing and stops apologizing for it — the game's Dr. Steiner is Blaster Master's final boss promoted to arc villain. Same register, more runway.
Four — the ammo-scarcity discipline. WOLFHOUND rations ammunition the way Blaster Master rationed SOPHIA's weapon grenades: you can brute-force any fight with your base gun, but the upgrade weapons are expensive and punish the over-eager. Most modern Metroidvanias (Hollow Knight, Ori, Bloodstained) abandoned this for permanent-unlock spell systems. WOLFHOUND brings the scarcity back. Playing it, you can feel the 1988 muscle memory return.
The review verdict is +4. Not a +8. WOLFHOUND does not escape its schematic — there are passages where the citation is thicker than the invention, and the mid-act pacing sags in Area 6 for reasons a 1988 game never had to answer for. But +4 is the note that says I will come back to this one, and I will. Bit Kid — the studio behind CrossCode — has a habit of reverent-but-sharp-elbowed retro, and WOLFHOUND is the cleanest version of that habit yet. Somebody at that studio loves Blaster Master. It shows.
REJECTED COINS: +4 (Metacritic: thin, <5 reviews at time of draft — consensus still settling)