Indivisible arrived in October 2019 carrying an unusual burden: it was a crowd-funded passion project from a studio known for a fighting game, and it promised to fuse two genres that rarely share a disc. Lab Zero Games built a side-scrolling RPG that borrows its combat from Valkyrie Profile and its traversal from the platformers of the 16-bit era. Published by 505 Games, it shipped for Linux, macOS, Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, then reached Nintendo Switch on April 28, 2020, and Japan on July 16, 2020.
The result is one of the more confident genre blends of its year. It is not flawless, and its back half sags under its own ambition, but the core of Indivisible works better than the pitch suggested it would.
Trailer, via 505 Games.
Ajna Leaves Ashwat
The story opens with a battle between warriors led by Indr, voiced by Keith Silverstein, and the goddess Kala, voiced by Anjali Bhimani. Kala loses and is sealed on Mount Sumeru. Indr finds an abandoned baby, names her Ajna, and raises her as his daughter. Tania Gunadi voices Ajna.
Sixteen years later, Ajna lives with her father in the village of Ashwat. An army led by Dhar, voiced by Benjamin Diskin, attacks it and kills her father. She defeats Dhar, and a power wakes inside her that absorbs him into her mind — a pocket dimension she can carry with her. She forces him to lead her to his leader, the warlord Ravannavar, voiced by Michael Dorn, who ordered the attack.
That premise does a lot of work. Ajna is not a chosen one who accepts her destiny gracefully; she is angry, and the game lets her stay angry for a long stretch. The absorption mechanic gives the plot a reason to keep adding party members, which is the sort of structural glue most RPGs never bother to justify.
Two Games in One Body
Indivisible runs on two distinct systems, and the seam between them is where the game either wins or loses you.
In the overworld, you control Ajna in a 2D action platformer. She moves left and right and jumps. As the story advances she learns new abilities and moves, which open up further and faster routes through the world. Encounters transition seamlessly into combat.
Combat is the Valkyrie Profile inheritance. Each party member maps to a specific button. Pressing it sends that character toward the enemy. The order of your presses determines the combo, and holding up or down on the analog stick or D-pad modifies the attack. Upgrades let characters strike multiple times. Defense works the same way: you block with a specific character’s attack button, or block with the whole party. A meter fills during battle, and when it is full you can fire off super attacks.
| System | What you control | How it resolves |
|---|---|---|
| Overworld | Ajna, in 2D platformer form | Jump and traversal abilities open new routes |
| Combat | The full party, one button per character | Button order sets combos; up or down modifies attacks |
| Defense | Individual characters or the whole party | Attack button blocks; a meter fills for super attacks |
That table is the whole game in miniature, and it explains why Indivisible feels unlike its peers. Most action RPGs ask you to manage one character well. This one asks you to manage four at once, in sequence, under time pressure, and it never lets the pace drop far enough for you to get comfortable.
Thorani and the Chakra Gates
The plot keeps moving after Ravannavar. Ajna chases him to Mount Sumeru and kills him, only to learn that he wanted her power to unseal Kala. Ajna is a piece of Kala that broke off after the imprisonment and became the baby Indr found. Kala’s aim is to destroy the world and rebuild it.
Dhar defects to Ajna’s side once he learns Ravannavar lied to him about wanting world peace. Cast out of Sumeru, Ajna and her companions are rescued by the Deva Thorani, voiced by Zehra Fazal, who points her toward a nearby port. There she meets Angwu, voiced by Laura Patalano, a former member of Indr’s party. Angwu tells her to find three chakra gates around the world and activate them, building her power for the fight with Kala.
This is where Indivisible spreads out. The chakra gates turn the map into a checklist, and the game’s environments — drawn from a wide spread of real-world cultures and mythologies — carry the middle act. It is the most beautiful stretch of the game and the least urgent. The combat stays sharp; the stakes go quiet.
Where the Ambition Shows
Lab Zero’s fighting-game pedigree is visible everywhere in the combat. The timing windows are tight, the combo routing has real depth, and the party system rewards players who think about sequencing rather than mashing. That is the part of Indivisible that will still hold up in a decade.
The platforming is thinner. Ajna’s traversal abilities are gated behind story progress, which means exploration is less about skill and more about whether you have unlocked the right move yet. The world looks enormous and often plays small.
Then there is the ending of the story’s road. Lab Zero went defunct, and the game’s additional content was discontinued. A version for Amazon Luna shipped on October 20, 2020, eleven days after the studio closed. Indivisible was the last game Lab Zero made. Whatever the team intended to build on top of this foundation never happened, and the version we have is the version we keep.
That context matters when weighing the game. Indivisible is complete as a campaign, but it reads as a first chapter in a larger plan that got cut off. The chakra gates, the expanding cast, the pocket dimension full of absorbed allies — all of it points toward a bigger second act that no longer exists.
Our verdict: 8.0/10. Indivisible earns that score on the strength of its combat, its art direction and its refusal to treat genre-blending as a gimmick. It loses points for platforming that never matches the ambition of its battle system and for a middle act that trades momentum for scenery. It is the best thing Lab Zero made, and the fact that it was also the last is the part worth remembering.
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