Steel Seed review: Spare parts

Science fiction author Daniel Keys Moran once wrote that technique, and mastery of technique, was the difference between mediocre and good artists, but that even that probably wasn’t as important as conviction. Steel Seed is a game without the conviction to be its own thing, something assembled out of spare parts from a variety of different games, combined together without much thought of whether they work. While it’s not bad, it’s extremely derivative, the video game equivalent of a copy of a copy of a copy, faded and gray, fed into a machine because the original has been lost. It is a game without anything to say.

And that’s a shame, because Steel Seed is, for the most part, competent, at least if you disassemble it to look at each piece individually. Developer Storm in a Teacup clearly knows what they’re doing. But if you try to put them together into a single coherent whole, they don’t fit, and Steel Seed never becomes its own thing; just different parts, sourced mostly from games made during the Xbox 360 era.

Protagonist Zoe, clearly ill, starts the game on what seems to be an operating table, slipping out of consciousness while her scientist dad works furiously in the background. When she wakes up, thousands of years have passed, she’s got a new body that makes her look like a rejected cyborg ninja design for Mortal Kombat, and she runs into KOBY, an adorable little flying robot companion who helps guide her along. Zoe needs to save the world by making sure the program her father started to repopulate the earth after humanity goes all but extinct, thanks to environmental catastrophes brought on by what seems to be climate change, works properly. To do that, she’ll need to gather Several Really Important Items ™, discover what happened to her father, and avoid all the robots trying to kill her. Simple, right? Good thing she has KOBY.

A moment of silence, please

The story isn’t terrible (though it is rather predictable), but you do spend large sections of Steel Seed absent it. The hearts of the game are Zoe and KOBY. Their relationship is cute, as is KOBY himself, but the issue is that he only speaks in beeps and boops, leaving Zoe to do the C-3PO thing where she both translates what KOBY is saying and responds to it in a single line. That these exchanges mostly work is a testament to Steel Seed’s writing, but it also means that a lot of these conversations are essentially just Zoe talking to herself, which brings me to the other problem I have with her: she talks too goddamn much.

See, Zoe, like many protagonists in modern video games, has a bad case of Video Game Protagonist is Always Talking, Often to Themselves Syndrome. This disease is highly contagious and seems to be everywhere now; it’s clearly doing something right, but it also personally drives me up the wall. Luring an enemy over for a stealth kill? Zoe will ask them, out loud, to please fall for it. Real stealthy, girl. Loot a robo-corpse? Zoe says “This will be useful.” I know it will, Zoe; I don’t need you to say it every time we loot a dead robot. I don’t need every protagonist to be the strong, silent type, but God have mercy, please, just give me a few minutes they aren’t commenting on absolutely everything, I beg. Let me, the person playing the game, have thoughts about what I’m doing that aren’t force-fed to me through Zoe.

This is annoying, but it isn’t awful. No, Steel Seed’s real bugaboo is its gameplay. Storm in a Teacup has billed the game as a stealth-action title, and those parts work well, even if none of them are particularly novel. The platforming is vintage Uncharted/Assassin’s Creed, where you parkour between outlined-in-yellow-so-you-know-Zoe-can-climb-it ledges. There’s nothing new about this, but at least it works, and when Steel Seed mixes it up by, say, having you move Zoe onto a platform, switch over to KOBY so he can activate a switch, and then switch back to Zoe so she can ride the platform she’s on to a new area or move to the next one while it’s in reach or passing by her, it's pretty good. There are a lot of scripted setpieces that are both obvious and just fine, and given how often the floor falls out from under her and she goes sliding down some ramp, you’d think Zoe was auditioning for a starring role in the next Tomb Raider or Uncharted. Again, none of this is revolutionary or challenging, but it works well enough to be interesting and when I wasn’t platforming, I often wished I was.

Stealth? Action? Who needs 'em?

Part of that is because everything else is worse. Stealth is incredibly basic, and pulled almost mechanic for mechanic from Assassin’s Creed. Instead of Bush Stealth, Steel Seed is about Glitch Stealth, which is basically Bush Stealth, but instead of hiding in a bush, you hide in purple glitch fields so enemies can’t see you. So basically Bush Stealth, just purple. You either use these fields as stopgaps before moving to the next one or the next object you can take cover behind, or lure enemies in by having Zoe rap on her metallic chest. Ideally, they'll hear you and walk right into the bus — I mean, glitch field — you're hiding in for a stealth kill. Rinse and repeat.

The real problem, though, is when stealth fails for one reason or another and you have to fight. Steel Seed’s combat is lousy: Zoe has the bog-standard “light attack, heavy attack, dodge” system that has plagued the Western action game for the last twenty years and… it’s bad, y’all. It’s real bad. Mostly, combat devolves into dodging choreographed attacks and mashing light attacks until the enemy in front of you dies because heavy attacks take too long to be viable and enemies shrug off most blows while they're winding up to smack you for half your life bar. Oh, and enemies are super spongy, so fighting them is really boring. And there’s not a ton of variety when it comes to them, either.

Don’t worry, though; if you get hit, you can heal with limited healing charges that you can restore either by hitting enemies or resting at a S4VI Point, which serves as a fast travel location, upgrade center, save point, and so on. The only downside is that healing at one of them resurrects any enemy you’ve killed. Wait a second…

The Dark Souls of Xbox 360-era games

Yeah, you read that right. This game is Dark Souls, too, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. I guess because you can return to old areas to hunt for collectibles, but this system doesn’t really make sense since you can restore healing charges effectively by hitting enemies. But that’s Steel Seed for you; if another game has it, it has to have it, too, whether it makes sense or not.

Oh, you know what else Steed Seed has? Skill trees! You can spend the resources you loot off dead bodies to buy dodge attacks, new abilities like portable glitch fields for KOBY, enhanced healing charges and so on because video games have skill trees and… I mean, really, aren’t you tired of just seeing the same mechanics from other games over and over and over again? I know I am. At least Steel Seed makes you unlock skills by performing individual actions like getting so many stealth kills, dodging so many attacks, and so on. If you want a new toy, you have to show mastery of an old one; you can't just buy it. I think that's pretty cool, and smart game design, to boot.

But little things like that aren't enough. Steel Seed is a good-looking, competently made game with very few original ideas. What’s here is fine, but none of it surprised me or made me think. It was just an amalgamation of a dozen games I’d played years before, with not much of its own to recommend it.

God help us, we're in the hands of engineers

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe I shouldn’t judge Steel Seed just because it's a lot like a lot of other games, but it’s hard not to when the things it’s pulling from are so obvious and we’ve seen these mechanics so many times before. If you haven’t played the games Steel Seed was obviously inspired by, I imagine it’s more interesting. But I have; and that meant I spent most of its runtime very, very bored.

To its credit, Steel Seed doesn’t overstay its welcome. You can clear the whole thing in about twelve hours, and nothing here (well, aside from the combat) is bad. It’s just dull. Storm in a Teacup clearly knows how to make games and knows what they’re doing here, but it’s such a mismatch of parts from so many other games that none of them really manage to come together in a coherent way. Steel Seed never finds its identity, which is a shame because Storm in a Teacup is clearly a talented developer who understands how to make games. But Moran was onto something when he said that technique wasn’t as important as conviction. Zoe may be the chosen one destined to save the world, but the game around her never really feels like it's convinced of it — or itself. And if you can’t persuade yourself of the story you’re telling, it’s damn hard to convince anyone else.

This review is based on a PC code provided by the publisher. Steel Seed releases on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on April 22nd, 2025.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.