Like if Treasure and Hideki Kamiya made a PS1/Saturn-era metroidvania. Unbeatable 1990's floating island cloudpunk vibes, with absolutely spectacular movement and combat that rivals Ori 2. Narratively lighter than would have hoped, but your main sidekick is a great, tragic character. The bad: Truly abysmal/unhelpful map system, ridiculously spongey enemies, two (thankfully optional) infuriating minigames, momentum-killing forced arena encounters where more regularly-placed enemies would probably have been better (may be a me-problem), somewhat weightless finale. Otherwise very solid, would totally play another game by these folks.

I'm not too big of a fan of linearity or focus on combat in Metroidvanias, I did go into this one expecting that tho.

I was kinda surprised by this having probably the best movement I've ever used in a 2D Metroidvania, every new power was interesting and chained in with others at the end having a really good movement expirence. Along with this the combat while forced and in your face utilized movement a lot which is nice change of pace from darksouls style that is genuinely hurting the genre.

The linearity is in a very order of ecclesia way, you're never locked out from backtracking which is nice, and the game opens up a bit near the end, overall this knocks it down a lot.