Aggelos 2 Beginner's Guide: 14 Things to Know Before You Play

I have a bad habit of judging games entirely by their sprites, and Aggelos 2 has some of the loveliest pixel art I’ve seen all year. So I settled in on a rainy Saturday with tea and a blanket, fully expecting a gentle little adventure.

That expectation lasted about twenty minutes.

This game is charming and warm and beautiful to look at, and it will also knock you around a bit if nobody explains how it works first. None of the systems are complicated. They’re just very quiet about explaining themselves.

So here’s the list I wish someone had handed me. There’s nothing here that spoils the story, and most of it will save you an hour of squinting at the screen wondering what you did wrong.

What is Aggelos 2 about?

You play an Aggelos, a high ranking angel called in to defend the Kingdom of Lumen while the Gods of Light are losing badly to the Army of Darkness. Fairly early on you take on a demon form because being purely good is apparently not going to cut it.

It’s a Metroidvania, so you’ll unlock abilities, remember the door you couldn’t open, and come back for it later. Developed by WONDERBOY BOBI and published by PQube and PixelHeart, it landed on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch at the end of August 2026.

If you want a comparison to orient yourself, think Wonder Boy or Shovel Knight rather than something as punishing as Hollow Knight. Most people finish somewhere between 7 and 15 hours depending on how thoroughly you poke around.

Treat form switching as movement, not a menu choice

The angel form is slower and more disciplined, with better ranged coverage and the ability to heal. The demon form is fast and aggressive with a speed boost attached.

New players tend to pick a favorite and stay there. That’s the single biggest thing holding you back, because the game is built around flipping between them constantly.

Start swapping in ordinary fights before you need to. By the time it matters, your thumbs will already know what to do.

Learn the projectile colors right away

Your light form destroys pink projectiles. Your dark form destroys red ones.

The game does not sit you down and explain this clearly, so a lot of players spend the opening hours dodging things they could have simply erased.

Once it clicks, whole rooms stop being scary. You stop reading enemy attacks as danger and start reading them as a color prompt.

The bracelet is your real weapon

You start with nothing, then pick up a bracelet that fires ranged shots. A sword comes along after that for close range work.

Because the sword feels like the more serious weapon, most of us default to it and walk straight into damage. Don’t. The bracelet plays a bit like Mega Man, and firing from a safe distance is almost always the right answer.

Save the sword for enemies already in your face, or for when you want something dead quickly.

Spend your orbs instead of hoarding them

Orbs are the currency, and your wallet starts capped at a miserly 100. Every wallet upgrade adds another 100, topping out at 3,000.

If you’re anything like me, your instinct is to save up for something impressive later. That instinct actively costs you money here, because anything you earn over the cap simply evaporates.

Buy the wallet upgrades when you see them, then keep spending.

Buy your upgrades in a sensible order

Shops sell sword, armor, ranged attack and life upgrades, plus magic and healing capacity. It’s tempting to chase raw damage first.

I’d put health and armor at the top of the list instead. Surviving one extra hit does more for you in this game than killing things marginally faster.

Ranged attack upgrades come next, then magic and healing capacity once you’re deeper into the dark world.

Grab every heart container you can find

Heart containers raise your maximum health permanently, and you’ll often earn one after a boss fight. Others are tucked away in the map waiting for you to notice them.

If a boss feels genuinely impossible, the answer is usually not better reflexes.

Go find a heart container or two, buy some armor, then come back. The fight will feel like a different encounter.

Know what your vials are doing

Vials behave completely differently depending on which form you’re wearing. In angel form they heal you. In demon form they give you a temporary stat boost instead.

That’s a genuinely useful bit of flexibility once you understand it, and a genuinely annoying surprise when you don’t.

If you’re low on health, check which form you’re in before you reach for one.

Watch that heal button

On the same note, the button layout has a quirk that catches nearly everyone. As Angel the A button heals you. As Demon the same button casts speed up.

In a busy fight it is very easy to panic, mash it, and get a burst of speed when what you wanted was health.

Building the habit of checking your form before you heal takes about an hour, and then it stops being a problem.

Pick up every egg you walk past

There are 100 mystical eggs scattered across the game, and you trade them in for resources and certain abilities. They’re worth collecting.

The catch is that the game gives you no tracker for them, so there’s no tidy checklist telling you what you’ve missed.

Which means the only sane approach is to grab them as you go. Detouring for an egg is basically always worth the ten seconds.

The map will not hold your hand

I’ll be honest, the map is the weakest part of the game. You can’t zoom, the biomes aren’t color coded, and the markers are faint enough to miss entirely.

Dead ends are going to happen. That’s not you being bad at Metroidvanias, that’s the map being unhelpful.

My workaround was low tech and it worked. Take a screenshot whenever you hit a door or gap you can’t get past yet, and you’ll actually remember to come back.

Early warping is limited, so plan your routes

For the first chunk of the game you can only warp between special save points, which means some long walks back and forth.

Mid game you unlock warping between all save points, and the whole thing opens up.

Until then, try to finish what you’re doing in an area before you leave it. It saves a lot of trudging.

Slow down when you reach the dark world

Progress far enough and you’ll start using dark rifts to travel into an overlaid dark dimension. Same geography, different enemy layouts, noticeably meaner.

This is where the difficulty spikes, and it catches people right after they’ve started feeling confident.

Take it room by room. Nothing here demands speed from you.

Dying really isn’t a big deal

The game auto saves and there are plenty of save spots, which is a real improvement over the first Aggelos. You don’t lose progress when you die.

All a death costs you is the walk back. That’s it.

So please be braver than I was. I spent my first few hours playing very cautiously for no reason at all.

Collect dark shards as you go if you want the good ending

The good ending requires you to track down dark shards, and the game is fairly shy about telling you this.

Worse, the final and most important one isn’t marked on your map at all.

Gathering them steadily throughout your playthrough is much kinder to yourself than trying to reconstruct where they all were at the end.

Should you play Aggelos 2?

It has real flaws. The map is frustrating, and flying is limited to horizontal movement with an energy bar that drains far too fast for my liking.

But the sprite work is genuinely gorgeous, and there’s a rhythm to swapping forms that feels wonderful once your hands learn it.

What stayed with me was how it felt in the quiet moments. Drifting through a soft, glowing forest in angel form, then flipping to demon and tearing through a room, then back again.

It’s a game that rewarded me for relaxing into it, which is not something I expected from something with 13 bosses. Give it two hours and the color of a projectile will start telling you exactly who to be.

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Images in this article are from the Aggelos 2 page on Steam and used under Fair Use