Super charming with cute characters and awesome worldbuilding, full of clever puns and both ocean, pop culture, and soulslike game references. It's one of the only games in this genre that I've been able to fully engage with its story emotionally and understand, and that alone makes it pretty special to me. It also features a wonderful soundtrack that fits perfectly for this underwater adventure.

Mechanically the game is pretty solid, too. It can take a while to get used to the unique parry and I never really grew to love it, but it feels amazing when you do get it to work. The rest of the combat is okay. It's not quite as tight as you expect in a game like this. Difficulty was pretty well scaled, with some later bosses be a heavy challenge. I also really respect the game for having such robust accessibility settings that allows anyone to play this and essentially one-shot enemies if they choose. Play it your way and have fun!

I don't love challenging combat anyway, so it was the old school mascot platformer feel of the game that endeared me to it so much. Even though movement and traversal weren't fantastic, exploring the areas, unlocking secrets paths to find collectibles, a strong use of verticality throughout, and above all trying on the vast array of different adorable shells and experimenting with their powers was a joy.

Sadly, the game is pretty buggy with trophies that don't work (sigh) and some nasty lag at launch, but I do expect that'll get better quickly with patches that the devs have already said are coming very soon. I'm glad I went and played this now, though, because I can be recommending it to everyone for the rest of the year.

This is an incredibly unique rhythm game that creates the feeling that you're actively participating in a pop album audio-visual laser show of sorts. The gameplay itself is varied, creative, and it's a pleasure to navigate the auto-run courses with the gorgeous neon art and fantastic musical notes giving all sorts of sensual pleasure. There are some sections that reminded me of the great movement/sound experience in The Pathless, but this is certainly not a 1 for 1 comp to that game. As for the story, it seems to be about love, acceptance, and healing, but I wasn't really completely following it as it is definitely a little abstract. I'm not the kind of gamer to care about perfecting these levels or getting high scores, and in fact it frustrated me when I would crash and the music briefly got interrupted while the game reset me back into the level (even though to the credit of the devs this happens in a flash). It's a brief, very enjoyable experience that I'm glad I had, and I come away from it loving the music and wanting to listen to the soundtrack straight through as soon as I can get the chance.