Project Ants

Overview

Project Ants is a 3D Metroidvania from solo-scale studio Ant Team, and its pitch is a clean fusion of two bloodlines: the exploration depth of Hollow Knight and the technical hack-and-slash of Ninja Gaiden. You play a fallen Phragmotic Ant Warrior, a soldier bred for war, in a fractured insect kingdom. A cataclysm shattered the hive mind, turned clan against clan, and cast you out after a devastating defeat. The road back runs through six interconnected zones, five major bosses, and a steady drip of memory fragments that reveal what actually broke the kingdom.

Two systems carry the game. First, movement is combat: wall jumps chain into aerial strings, dashes carry invincibility frames, and every boss assumes you will fight in three dimensions. Second, the pheromone economy lets you spend a recharging meter on openings, mobility, and battlefield control instead of raw damage. Mastering movement is just as important as mastering combat, and the store page says so outright.

Who it is for: Hollow Knight and Nine Sols players who want a 3D take on ability-gated exploration, character-action fans who miss parry-heavy boss design, and anyone who played the ant levels in childhood platformers and thought "what if the whole game was this, but hard."

Who it is not for: players who want a relaxing map-clearer. The parry window is generous but punishing to ignore, and bosses are tuned for pattern memorization.

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Getting Started

The game opens with a short cinematic: the hive mind fracturing, clans turning on each other, your warrior cast out. You wake in the Abandoned Nest among dead soldiers with three tools: claw attacks, a dodge, and a wall jump. The tutorial is environmental rather than verbal, which means the game will not stop you from skipping its most important lesson.

Your first 30 minutes

1. Grab the Pheromone dispenser in the Abandoned Nest side room. It is optional and missable. Without early Pheromone access, the first boss fight runs at half effectiveness, and the game gets twice as hard.
2. Find both hidden Anthems before leaving the Nest. The tutorial zone hides two Anthem fragments that fund your first shrine upgrade. Early health upgrades prevent death loops at the Stag Warlord.
3. Practice the 5-hit light chain and stop. Hits one through three are safe and cancelable into a dodge. Hit four is a wide spin with long recovery; hit five is a lunge that roots you. Mashing gets you killed by the first raptor-type enemies.
4. Test the parry on slow enemies. The window is around 15 frames, which is forgiving by action-game standards. Learn it on trash before a boss demands it.
5. Open the map and check verticality. The map tracks multiple Z-levels. If a path seems to end, look up and down before backtracking.

Beginner mistakes to avoid

• Treating the dash as a gap-closer. It is a teleport with i-frames that passes through enemies and thin walls. Dodging backward takes you out of counter range; dodging through an enemy parks you behind it with a free hit window.
• Hoarding Anthems. Shrines are frequent enough that unspent fragments are wasted survivability. Spend at every shrine.
• Ignoring Swarm Sense. It costs no resources and has no cooldown, reveals hidden passages and patrol routes through walls, and turns dense rooms into readable floor plans.
• Fighting gravity. Falling damage punishes impatience on branch bridges. The wall jump lets you reset a bad descent; use it instead of gambling a long fall.
• Skipping NPCs. Wandering NPCs hand out rare items and upgrades. Every conversationalist is worth stopping for.

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Core Mechanics

The combat loop: engage, open, punish, disengage

Project Ants builds fights around a four-beat rhythm. You engage from neutral, create an opening (parry, dodge-through, or a pheromone setup), punish during the stagger, then disengage before the enemy's recovery ends. Light attacks chain five hits with cancel windows after the first three. Heavy attacks break guard and ground flyers, and a charged heavy lunges into a bite that heals a small percentage of the damage dealt. That lifesteal bite is your only sustain, so the charge heavy is not optional in long fights.

The parry deserves its own paragraph because bosses are built around it. A successful parry staggers the attacker and reflects projectiles. A failed parry takes full damage plus a vulnerability window, which is the actual risk. The 15-frame window is testable within the first ten minutes, and every boss exam in the game assumes you passed it.

The pheromone system

Pheromones are the resource that separates Project Ants from its inspiration shelf. You earn meter from kills and dispenser pickups; it recharges at rest points. Four skills spend it:

Pheromone Trail is the workhorse. In combat it speeds repositioning; in exploration it leaves a visible breadcrumb for backtracking; against bosses it refreshes on damage dealt, which lets you keep the speed buff up through an entire phase. The store page frames the pheromone system as a way to create openings, chain combos, and enhance mobility, and that triple duty is why the meter should almost never sit full.

Anthems: the upgrade economy

Anthem fragments combine three to a permanent upgrade at shrines in safe rooms:

Recommended spend order: Health 4, Strength 3, Speed 3, then Health 7, Strength 6, Speed 5. Speed matters more than the mid-game suggests because each level shortens dash cooldown, and at Speed 5 the dash comes back in 1.2 seconds instead of 2. That is the difference between escaping a boss combo and eating its last swing.

Phragmotic abilities: the gating kit

Four permanent abilities gate progression, each from a boss or hidden chamber:

• Mandible Crush (early): charged bite, huge damage, breaks cracked walls. The exploration key for zone one and two.
• Swarm Sense (early): passive detection of passages, breakables, and enemies. Range scales with Senses.
• Compound Vision (mid-game): slows time for 3 seconds, extendable, costs 1 pheromone bar. Doubles as a platforming aid and a boss-pattern decoder.
• Exoskeleton Shell (mid-game): 50% damage reduction for 8 seconds at a 20% movement cost, 30-second cooldown. The panic button and the phase-transition crutch.

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World Map and Route

The kingdom runs six zones in a non-linear layout. Backtracking is the design, and every major ability reopens three to five spots in old zones. The map marks unexplored pockets with a shimmer icon; clear them before pushing forward.

1. Abandoned Nest (tutorial): linear chambers, three hidden Anthems, the optional Pheromone dispenser.
2. The Canopy (early): branch bridges and aerial enemies. The Mantis Blademaster is the first real skill check.
3. Underground Tunnels (mid): tight burrow ambushes, wall-jump exam rooms, and the Stag Warlord.
4. The Hive Ruins (mid): collapsed multi-level hive with environmental puzzles. Wasp Aerial and the Beetle Colossus live here.
5. The Queen's Chamber (late): thickest corruption, fastest enemies, pheromone dispensers spread far apart so meter management tightens.
6. The Core (endgame): the Hive Mind, the cataclysm's truth, and a fight that assumes a full kit.

Sequence breakers exist. Frame-perfect wall jumps in the Canopy reach a speedrunner path that skips the Mantis Blademaster entirely. It is not required knowledge, but it tells you the movement engine is the real content.

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Progression Strategy

The optimal ability route minimizes backtracking trips:

1. Clear the Abandoned Nest, take all three Anthems, grab the dispenser.
2. Beat the Stag Warlord in the Tunnels for Mandible Crush.
3. Return to the Nest: cracked walls hide two more Anthems.
4. Climb the Canopy, beat the Mantis Blademaster, take Compound Vision.
5. Re-run the Nest and tunnel entrances: Compound Vision reveals hidden platforms with three Anthems.
6. Descend to the Wasp Aerial, win, take the Exoskeleton Shell.
7. Sweep everywhere with the Shell: fire-resistant doors open four or more Anthem caches.
8. Push the Hive Ruins, beat the Beetle Colossus, enter the Queen's Chamber for final upgrades.
9. The Core. Fight the Hive Mind.

Resource logic follows the route. Early Anthems go to Health so boss mistakes are survivable; mid-game splits between Strength and Speed; Senses waits until Compound Vision is in hand. NPC questlines pay rare items at each zone handoff, so talk before you travel.

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Builds and Playstyles

Project Ants has no classes, so a build is an upgrade priority plus two pheromone skills. Three archetypes cover the space:

Tank is the honest first-run pick. Speedster is the second-run style and the speedrun chassis. Tactician suits players who would rather control a fight than outpace it.

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Step-by-Step Strategy: The Five Boss Fights

Sequence 1: Stag Warlord (first real boss)

1. Enter with at least 6 health and a full pheromone meter.
2. Phase one teaches three attacks: the pincer slam (slow overhead, dodge sideways), the horizontal sweep (fast, parry it), and the charge (head lowers, rush forward, jump over).
3. Punish each recovery with two or three light hits, then disengage. Greed is the only way to lose phase one.
4. Phase two, at 60% health, adds the ground pound. The rear-up telegraph means jump; the shockwave stays grounded.
5. Phase three speeds the charge and chains it into a sweep. Dodge the charge, expect the sweep, parry it.
6. Lay Pheromone Trail at the phase-two transition. The speed boost carries you through the charge-sweep combo.
7. Reward: Mandible Crush.

Sequence 2: Mantis Blademaster (the parry exam)

1. Her three-hit combo is fully parryable, and the fight is designed to teach that fact.
2. Overhead slash: parry when the blade peaks.
3. Horizontal slash: parry when the blade sits behind her.
4. Rising slash: parry during the wind-up, before the launch hit.
5. Three clean parries stagger her for four seconds. Unload the charged bite.
6. Missed a parry? Dodge the rest and reset to neutral. Do not improvise.
7. Phase two adds the spin: multi-hit, unparryable, dash through it on i-frames.
8. Reward: Compound Vision.

Sequence 3: Wasp Aerial (the airborne fight)

1. The arena stacks four platforms on wall-jump paths. Grounded swings whiff all day.
2. Wall jump, pop Pheromone Trail mid-air for the speed boost, string light attacks on the fly, dash to the next platform.
3. Her divebomb is parryable. Grounding her opens an eight-second punish window; go all in.
4. Phase two spawns wasps. A 2-bar Burst clears them instantly.
5. Reward: Exoskeleton Shell.

Sequence 4: Beetle Colossus (the environmental puzzle)

1. Front armor is absolute. The fight is a routing puzzle, not a damage race.
2. Lure it under a hanging rock, dodge clear, let the rock stun it.
3. The stun exposes the unarmored rear for five seconds. Charged bite, always.
4. Each stun window shortens: five seconds, then four, then three.
5. Phase two collapses the ceiling into a vertical arena. Wall jump the climb while dodging downward acid.
6. The kill shot is a ceiling drop onto its back, charged bite on the way down.
7. Rewards: Health upgrade plus the Queen's Chamber path.

Sequence 5: The Hive Mind (final exam)

1. Phase one is a four-limb amalgam, each limb on its own health bar. Kill the front-left limb first; it attacks fastest.
2. Phase two, at three limbs down, exposes the core and its homing volley. Compound Vision slows the projectiles enough to weave them; punish the core between volleys.
3. Phase three shrinks the arena and adds floor hazards plus continuous beams. Hug the core: the beams cannot hit point-blank. Pheromone Cloak's 3x opener lands here.
4. Phase four at 20% is a race. Everything speeds up. Spend the meter, stack Shell, and trade.
5. Win, watch the truth of the cataclysm, and collect Boss Rush access.

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Advanced Tips

• Wall jump cancels are the skill ceiling. Wall jump, one light hit, wall jump, repeat, keeps you airborne indefinitely on large enemies. Practice on the Stag Warlord; he is big enough to be patient with.
• Trail placed directly under an enemy applies a 3-second slow, once per phase on most bosses. The slow window fits a full light chain.
• Compound Vision freezes pheromone meter decay. Activate it while a skill drains the meter and the drain pauses. Cloak-then-Compound extends your invisibility window meaningfully.
• Swarm Sense draws patrol routes as dotted lines. Route dense rooms through the gaps and skip fights you did not need.
• Speed 5 changes the game. A 1.2-second dash cooldown turns several phase-three boss patterns from death sentences into routine dodges. If a boss walls you, check whether more Speed would solve it.
• Shimmer icons are a contract. Every ability unlocks 3-5 new spots in old zones. Clearing them before advancing keeps your Anthem income ahead of the difficulty curve.

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FAQ and Common Mistakes

How long is the game? Eight to fifteen hours on a first run depending on exploration appetite; speedruns are projected at two to three hours.

Is there a map? Yes. It tracks explored areas, secrets, ability gates, and multiple Z-levels.

Can I respec Anthems? No respec has been announced. Spend deliberately.

Is there New Game Plus? Not confirmed. Boss Rush unlocks after the Hive Mind.

Difficulty settings? Nothing announced. The tuning assumes Metroidvania and character-action experience, with an accessibility angle: the store lists "playable without timed input" options and adjustable text size alongside captions and custom volume controls.

Does it support Steam Deck? Unconfirmed. Windows is the only announced platform and no ProtonDB report exists yet.

Why does the store page mention AI-generated content? The disclosure says generative AI was sporadically used for initial references and temporary art, which are being replaced with hand-crafted content during production.

Is it worth wishlisting before launch? If Hollow Knight's exploration loop and Ninja Gaiden's parry economy sound like your two favorite things, yes. The demo-to-full-game expectations hinge on how the six zones connect in the final build.

When does it release? No date announced. The current target window is 2026, and wishlist notifications are the reliable way to catch it.