It’s honestly kind of insane how good this game is. Quake is one of the literal first ever fully 3D first-person shooters, and in spite of its age, it’s still significantly more fun than 90% of the genre today. This is due to an excellent core design philosophy, strong level and enemy design, a solid offensive toolkit, and a surprisingly thorough grasp of atmosphere.

Quake is different to most modern shooters in that, rather than emphasizing cover mechanics and hitscan aiming, it instead emphasizes complex movement, positioning, pattern reading, and projectile mechanics. This means that you’re constantly moving and applying skills beyond “aim and shoot”, and the way the game layers its mechanics together and explores them through its level and enemy design is nothing short of brilliant.

Outside the first level of each of its four “episodes”, Quake very rarely employs hitscan enemies, meaning nearly every enemy’s attacks can be reliably dodged with the right movement. However, this doesn’t mean that avoiding damage is easy - flying enemies like Scrags can shoot pretty fast-moving projectiles, Fiends are tanky and will aggressively leap at you repeatedly, Death Knights chase you down relentlessly and are a constant threat, and Ogres force you to move sideways relative to them and to keep track of their grenades as they bounce around.

Those Ogres are one of my favorite enemies in the whole genre - the way their grenades bounce is chaotic but deterministic, and as a result, predicting their trajectory becomes a worthwhile skill. It’s especially worthwhile in encounters with multiple Ogres, which can quickly become a serious threat as they flood the arena with bouncing grenades.

Of course, not every enemy can be a winner. The Shambler is pretty boring to fight - whenever you’re not in melee range of it, it can start up a fully hitscan lightning bolt attack, meaning you either need to repeatedly bait its melee attacks or repeatedly duck behind cover and take potshots intermittently. It’s a pretty straightforward and repetitive strategy, but these guys have so much health (especially on the higher difficulties) that fighting them can really start to drag. Fortunately, they don’t show up more than once or twice per level until episode 4.

Sadly, the game takes a bit of a nosedive in quality a couple levels into episode 4. In addition to more Shamblers, it more or less stops using Ogres, the best enemy in the game, and it introduces two new enemy types called the Spawn and the Vore. Spawns are okay in small numbers, but they’ll incessantly jump at you and explode when killed, and in large numbers, which you’ll often encounter in the later levels of episode 4, you’re pretty much guaranteed to take a huge chunk of damage if you don’t kill them on sight. This means if you don’t memorize their placement, you’re going to die a lot, and if you do, they stop being a threat. I don’t find them very interesting to fight.

The Vore is a weirder case. These things can be fine in the right arena; they fire a homing projectile that can curve somewhat around walls to continue pursuing you. This more or less forces a specific movement pattern in order to dodge it in arenas that don’t have terrain that’s safe to hide behind. Unfortunately, most of the time they’re encountered down a long hallway or in an open room, which means that avoiding their projectiles becomes a matter of running in a circle or repeatedly running back down the hallway to block it using a larger wall.

Despite these issues, episode 4 still has a lot of really interesting level layouts. Quake and its contemporaries are different to most modern shooters in that their levels are often labyrinthine, highly vertical mazes with keys, doors, and secrets to discover. In addition to being interesting to explore and navigate, the excellent level design on display enhances the combat, because it enables you to utilize your quick movement to reposition quickly and take advantage of terrain structures which are often fairly complex. Good tactics and level knowledge can allow you to block line of sight with dangerous enemies, lure more aggressive enemies into another room, force multiple enemies into a chokepoint before destroying them all with an explosive, and much, much more. This excellent level design goes hand in hand with the great weapon roster.

Quake’s weapons include a shotgun, a nailgun, enhanced versions of those two which deal additional damage at the cost of more ammo, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a lightning gun, and a shitty axe that’s almost useless and which can safely be disregarded. The shotguns and lightning gun are the only hitscan weapons in the game, and the shotguns deal fairly little damage while the lightning gun has heavily limited ammo and range. The nailgun, rocket launcher, and grenade launcher all require not only aim but assessment of projectile travel time. The rocket and grenade launcher deal heavy damage in an area but can damage you as well if you’re too close to the explosion, and have the longest travel time; this means that they’re difficult to use, but highly rewarding in the hands of a skilled player. The limited ammo and the fact that most episodes don’t give you the stronger weapons immediately help keep all of the weapons relevant, and I found myself switching between them regularly even towards the end of the game.

The level design often feels built around making it as difficult as possible to safely use explosives, which makes it all the more satisfying to use them effectively. I played on Hard, and my playstyle in the later parts of each episode often consisted of finding the safest way to use the rocket launcher, which was made far more challenging by the often claustrophobic levels and the dangerous and aggressive melee enemies. The explosives also enable advanced techniques like grenade and rocket jumping, which open up a huge number of routing and traversal possibilities for skilled players at the cost of some health.

The atmosphere of the game is also excellent - the soundtrack written by Trent Reznor and performed by Nine Inch Nails, combined with some great sound design, lend a suitably unsettling tone to each level. The Lovecraft-inspired story is fairly thin but mostly effective, and serves as a solid backdrop for the game, which mostly thrives on its gameplay and delightfully creepy aesthetics.

I do have a few stray complaints - for a start, I think the game could really use a proper checkpoint system. The quicksave system as it exists is a bit too freeform and can easily lead to save-scumming, but ignoring it entirely can make some of the longer levels extremely frustrating on a blind playthrough. Some kind of autosave would go a long way towards alleviating this irritation. Moreover, the game features a couple bosses, but they’re really nothing to write home about, and mostly consist of making your way to a specific part of their arena, which is kind of underwhelming in its failure to test your shooting skills. The Nightmare difficulty in the original version is actually considered by many experienced players to be easier than the Hard difficulty due to its enemies’ tendency to stand in one spot and fire constantly, making them more predictable. Fortunately, this is remedied in the enhanced remaster.

Despite my few complaints, Quake is a very solid game overall. The first three episodes more than make up for the disappointment of the fourth, and even if you stop before E4M4 (which is where I found the game to start getting really unenjoyable) the game still provides plenty of excellent levels to sink your teeth into. If you couldn’t tell already, I strongly recommend playing this game, not only to experience a seminal piece of first-person shooter history, but also on its own merits as one of the genre’s best entries to this day

Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game that I wanted very badly to like, and I almost did. The combat didn’t click with me at first, but over time I learned to really enjoy it for the most part. Unfortunately, it’s mired in a game which suffers at nearly every turn from the decision to adapt only five hours of content into a 30+ hour title. If the presentation weren’t so hit-or-miss I could maybe have forgiven its pacing issues, but sadly, the shoddy voice direction, distracting animations, and tedious side quests and traversal are just too much for me to overlook.

This review is going to be lengthy, and after a certain point which I will clearly delineate, there will be story spoilers. I’ll also note where the spoilers end, so if you want to read my review of the combat, feel free to skip ahead to that point.

I, for context, am a huge fan of the original Final Fantasy VII. It was the game that got me into Final Fantasy in general, and I owe a lot of my current taste to the fact that I discovered it when I did. These days I don’t hold it in the glowing esteem that I used to, but I still love it, and I’ve played it from start to finish three times. When Final Fantasy VII Remake was first announced, I was over the moon with excitement for it. I really, really wanted to like it.

From the first hours of the game, though, it’s obvious that something is off. There’s a certain awkwardness to the voice direction - line reads that are decent in isolation don’t flow naturally into one another, and the highly realistic visual style of the game clashes with the characters’ over-the-top, exaggerated gesticulations. Several of the characters in this game perform a cartoonish gesture with nearly every word that they speak, and while it makes sense for some of their personalities, it takes me out of the story; I find it hard to see these characters as real people without finding them incredibly annoying and exhausting to watch.

What really set off my alarm bells was the fact that within an hour of the opening credits, the main villain is on screen, acting the way we see him act in Advent Children and the other Compilation entries. Sephiroth’s portrayal in the original FFVII gave him this unhinged energy that, combined with the fact that you see his handiwork several hours before you encounter him in the flesh, made him feel more like a monster than a villain. This is what made him work, in my opinion - he was an unpredictable tactical nuke of a man, and it felt like nobody was safe from him. By having him show up on screen only to taunt Cloud without posing any tangible danger, this entire dynamic is immediately undermined. The swashbuckling, charismatic version of Sephiroth we see in Advent Children was already a downgrade, but this is a much longer story than Advent Children, and the main antagonist feeling unthreatening from the start is a much bigger problem here.

The thing is, while these issues are what dealt the killing blow to my enjoyment of Final Fantasy VII Remake, they weren’t what wore me down in the first place - that would be the game’s pacing. The events of FFVII that are adapted here stretch from the beginning of the game to the end of Midgar, a section which takes on average five hours to complete in the original game, maybe six or seven if you’re brand new to the series. However, this game’s main story is at least thirty hours long.

To an extent, I completely understand the urge to remake Final Fantasy VII in chunks. At the end of the day, classic JRPGs like FFVII featured a monstrous scope, spanning an entire planet, and realizing a world of that scope in enough detail to satisfy the standard for a modern Triple-A game is downright unfeasible in a single release. The problem was not splitting the game into thirds, but rather the decision to make the first third only cover roughly a seventh of the original game, and the failure to fill those extra hours with compelling content in order to justify the extended length.

SPOILERS LIE AHEAD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

If I were editing down Final Fantasy VII Remake, I would cut a full third of the content in the game. There are entire chapters that consisted of one or two screens in the original. These chapters add next to nothing in the way of meaningful worldbuilding or character development on top of what was in the original game, and they kill any sense of pacing or urgency that could have otherwise been present.

There are three full chapters of the game which consist of a collection of sidequests, and a point of no return after which all of the sidequests expire permanently. As such, if you want to complete them all on your first playthrough, you have to do them all at once. Only a few of these sidequests really feel worthwhile and lead to interesting combat or story beats. The majority of them ring hollow, contribute very little to the world or characters, and function as boring fetch quests that amount to simply running back and forth across a moderately sized zone. I would be more forgiving if the game allowed you to replay chapters from the start, but holding a gun to the player’s head and telling them to do all the sidequests at once is a great way to make them feel like a chore.

The game’s pacing issues don’t end with technically optional content, though. Early on, Cloud, Barret, and Tifa are on their way to bomb a second reactor. The path to Sector 5 takes them across the underside of the plate that stands above the lower section of the city, and in the process they pass by several massive lamps which simulate sunlight for the slums below. That should be it, right? They’ve now added an interesting worldbuilding detail that fleshes out the workings of a two-tiered city where half of its residents effectively live underground. Except that wasn’t enough; we need to now spend nearly an hour working our way around the underside of the plate painstakingly turning off every single lamp in order to reroute power to a currently-closed gate that was arbitrarily added specifically to justify the extended runtime of this chapter.

Just past the midway point, the main characters learn that Shinra intends to destroy the Sector 7 pillar, causing the plate to fall and destroy the entire sector of the city, killing everyone in it. This should create a sense of urgency as the main characters race back to Sector 7 in an effort to prevent the plate from falling. In the original, the process of getting back to Sector 7 takes maybe 20 minutes in total. The segment where the characters are trawling through the sewers is there to build the tension a little bit; the characters, desperate to return to Sector 7, are forced to escape a sewer first, and become more desperate as a result.

In Final Fantasy VII Remake, there is very little urgency because the characters aren’t sure whether the information is true. In fact, there is a dialogue exchange that functionally repeats with minor phrasing changes no less than four times, during which Tifa wonders whether the information is true, someone else reassures her that it’s probably not, and they decide they should hurry to Sector 7 anyway. Because the sewer section stretches on long enough for this same exchange to repeat so many times, it adds little in the way of tension, and mostly serves as a very visually bland dungeon that adds very little to the story except for some repetitive navel-gazing about the situation at hand.

In the original FFVII, the following section, the Train Graveyard, consisted of effectively two screens, and the process of running through them took ten minutes at a relatively slow pace. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, the Train Graveyard now makes up an entire chapter (of which there are 18 in the entire game) and represents more than an hour of playtime. There are playground rumors about the train graveyard that are implied to be potentially true by the events of the game, and exploring these rumors and their emotional implications for Aerith could have worked were it not so violently out of place considering the urgency that the situation should have. These rumors are never touched on again in the story and have no relevance beyond this chapter.

In fact, that’s a recurring theme of this game. Because of the fact that it’s effectively a thirty-hour intro sequence, huge plot points come up once before being discarded until the next game. This Roche guy who rides a motorcycle and is weirdly horny for Cloud? He shows up once in Chapter 4 and then vanishes from the game. The black hooded guys that are implied to be ex-SOLDIERs? They show up maybe twice and are thenceforth ignored. Hojo’s horrific experiments are explored in excruciating detail over the course of Chapter 17, and then completely discarded in favor of some bullshit with the Whispers of Fate and a version of Sephiroth who is inexplicably knowledgeable about the events of Final Fantasy VII.

Of course, not everything can fully pay off in this game, because this is the first entry in a trilogy. However, very little that is set up does pay off in a satisfying way in this game. When three entries in a series comprise a trilogy, usually each of them has a reasonably self-contained arc, and on paper, the Midgar portion of FFVII should as well, but because so much has been injected in order to pad the runtime, the overall arc of the story feels thematically unfocused.

The final chapter of the game essentially coming out of nowhere and changing the focus of the plot entirely at the eleventh hour doesn’t help matters; rather than Shinra being the big bads of the game like they’re set up to be, instead we end up fighting Sephiroth. This twist works in the original game, because it’s a rug pull that happens five hours into a 30 hour story; the jarring change of focus helps solidify Sephiroth as a world-ending threat, but here, we’ve just spent 30 hours fighting Shinra, and having the payoff of that robbed from us feels like a letdown because we don’t get to capitalize on our new focus until the next game.

I could bring up other examples of the story’s catastrophic pacing failures, but this segment has somewhat ironically gone on too long already. Instead I’ll discuss some of the other ways that the game’s pacing suffers that aren’t strictly story related. The game almost constantly forces you to squeeze through tight spaces, or crawl under low ceilings, or jump from one platform to another, and all of this stuff is entirely automated - you simply hold forward on the control stick - but it’s also unbearably slow to execute. It adds nothing of value and just makes the whole game more boring to play.

Some of the animations that play regularly take way too long as well; Cloud spends upwards of a second putting his sword away after slashing a box, which doesn’t sound like much, but with how many boxes there are to slash in this game, it adds up quickly and gets very tiresome. When a character jumps onto something they can swing from, there’s a noticeable pause where the camera changes angles before they actually jump on, and then the swinging itself is unnecessarily slow. During a later chapter where Red XIII accompanies you, there are regular segments where you have to send him across a wall that only he can climb on, so that he can pull a lever. However, each time this happens, in addition to the wall run which takes about 5 seconds, he has to spend an additional 10 seconds to land, reorient himself, pause for a second, reach up, and pull down the lever to open the path. All this is triggered by a singular button press, and the only function it achieves is to move from point A to point B.

In addition, moments where the game inexplicably forces you to slow-walk are bafflingly common. During the aforementioned Red XIII sequences, before you’re even allowed to press the button to send him across, you first need to slow-walk approach the ledge, wait for Red XIII to come up next to you, and then awkwardly face him in order to press triangle. Inside nearly any building, you’re not allowed to run at full speed. Multiple times throughout the game you’re forced to slow-walk while other characters exposit dialogue in what is effectively an unskippable cutscene. Some might insist that this improves “immersion”, but these moments only serve to bore me and take me out of the experience. Besides, when it gets to the point that taking the stairs in Shinra HQ is literally faster than taking the escalators because the escalators force you to slow-walk, something has gone very wrong.

Any of these problems wouldn’t be a big deal on their own; a few tedious segments out of a 30+ hour game are basically standard for Final Fantasy, after all. Rather, the horrible pacing is death by a thousand cuts; every few minutes there’s something that kills the pace to a minor degree, and 30 hours without a single well-paced segment later, the entire thing ends up feeling like a slog.
Based on this description alone, it sounds like this game doesn’t even deserve two and a half stars, but I assure you it does - I haven’t talked about the combat yet.

SPOILERS END HERE

If you’ll allow me one last burst of negativity, I initially hated Remake’s combat. It’s framed heavily as an action game, and for someone like me who’s used to action games behaving like Souls, DMC, and Bayonetta, the ways in which this system differs from theirs can make it hard to adjust to. Some of the enemies’ attacks in this game can be extremely difficult or even impossible to avoid, and the game expects you to deal with these attacks in numerous ways that don’t all involve avoiding damage altogether. This violated every single instinct I’ve ever had in an action game, where taking damage is something to be avoided at all costs, and instances of the game forcing you to take damage are flatly bad design in most cases.

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s combat, though, is much more nuanced than this. By giving the player multiple different characters to control, one character taking severe damage or even dying is nowhere near the setback that it would be in something like Devil May Cry, where your one character dying means game over. Here, forced damage is factored into a larger resource management game, and minimizing damage is only one aspect of that game wherein the player can claim an advantage.

Everything that works about the combat in this game is made possible by the ATB system. ATB is your primary resource, and it is built by using basic attacks, blocking incoming damage, and also innately at a very slow rate. Up to three characters can be in the party at once, and each character has their own ATB gauge. Because the non-controlled party members act fairly passively, and enemies have a strong tendency to aggro onto whichever character is being actively controlled, each character’s ATB generally needs to be built up manually by switching to them and attacking or blocking. Each character can store up to two charges of ATB at a time, and while most abilities consume one charge, some consume two, or in the case of several of Barret’s attacks, consume however many charges the character has, varying in strength based on that number.

What results is an absolutely brilliant web of complex systems that feed into each other in surprisingly dynamic ways. Resources are built up via effective aggression as well as defense, allowing for a multitude of viable playstyles, all of which require a degree of skill and strategy to succeed at the game’s tougher challenges. Both aggressive and defensive playstyles still require intelligent management of resources, planning, preparation, and strategy.

The ability to switch characters not only benefits the other systems, but patches several potential issues arising from certain design choices. The fact that so many attacks, often ones with knockback and stun effects, are functionally unavoidable, would be immensely frustrating in a game where you couldn’t switch to another character at any time in order to continue attacking and build up resources with which to recover. The fact that the AI doesn’t play optimally also encourages regular swapping in order to maintain a semblance of control over the party’s positioning, which is important, but impossible to fully optimize, and so decisions need to be made regarding whose positioning to prioritize.

Part of what makes the resource management game work so well is that, especially on Hard Mode, MP is very limited and very valuable. As such, options like Pray, which is an AoE heal which costs two ATB but casts faster than cure spells and does not cost MP, become significantly more worthwhile. Spells like Bravery/Faith, Protect/Shell, Haste, and their debuffing counterparts, are powerful but very expensive, as are the -aga variants of offensive spells. This balance of long- and short-term resource management works really well, and it rewards engaging with the game on a number of levels.

The stagger system can, in some games, lead to a reduction in depth, because suddenly the entirety of play revolves around maximizing damage in stagger windows. Here, fortunately, there is enough incentive to spend resources outside of stagger windows that it actually enhances the depth of strategy, because staggering an enemy quickly and maximizing damage both require ATB, and as such if you spend all of your ATB staggering an enemy then you won’t be able to do as much damage with that stagger. As such, you’re encouraged to spend as little ATB as possible in the process of staggering the enemy, but this causes the battle to draw on for longer, and you risk sustaining more damage and needing to spend resources in order to deal with that as well. There are many layers of strategy here, and the stagger system actually facilitates them, rather than making them less relevant.

Another frustration I had with the combat initially was that each character’s moveset felt rather limited. While I still feel this way to an extent (especially with the advent of Rebirth which largely fixes the problem) I can, with a stronger understanding of the system at large, better appreciate the situational nuance of the limited options in each character’s kit.

In a game like Final Fantasy XVI, the decision to prioritize moves that cause stagger versus moves that deal damage is generally fairly black and white, so the number of moves which affect positioning in different ways needs to be higher in order to achieve a similar level of depth. Here, for example, Cloud’s Braver and Focused Thrust seem fairly black-and-white, but in reality there are reasons to use each in situations where it might not be obvious that they’re the best option. Focused Thrust travels much further than Braver, so if Cloud is far away when the enemy is staggered, it allows him to get closer faster. Braver doesn’t increase stagger as much, but it does more raw damage, and doing enough raw damage can cause some enemies to become “pressured”.

This pressure mechanic is genius. In order to effectively stagger an enemy, it’s very useful to first put them into the pressured state, which significantly multiplies the amount of stagger damage they take, and often reduces their offensive capabilities as well. Each enemy is pressured in a different way; some are pressured upon hitting a weakness, while others are pressured on meeting some condition in battle or doing enough damage, so raw damage can still be very desirable outside of stagger windows. This level of nuance is possible due not only to the design of the moves, but the stagger/pressure system itself and the depth of the resource management system.

There are some enemy designs that don’t really work, of course. In general, enemies that force you into one specific strategy for significant periods of time, or which move around so quickly as to be impossible to reliably hit, as well as any kind of flying enemy - aerial combat in this game is not good - can be very frustrating to fight, and not in a good way. A couple of the bosses kind of suck as well, like one that essentially forces you to use Barret exclusively because it stays out of everyone else’s range, but then sometimes uses an attack that stuns him for 10+ seconds. Fortunately, the annoying enemies are not altogether that common, and the majority of the bosses are really solid and play off of the combat system quite well. Only a few really stood out to me on my initial playthrough, but they definitely get a lot spicier on Hard Mode.

One of the biggest issues with the combat of the game, though, is that the majority of normal enemies just die way too quickly for the resource management to really flourish. There are enough meatier fights in the game to make up for this, but it’s a little disappointing that a huge chunk of the encounters in the game end so quickly that the player isn’t really afforded an opportunity to grow their skills. I think that if basic enemies, especially early on, forced engagement with the system to a greater degree, the tutorialization of the game would actually be far stronger.

I don’t have a ton to say about the Materia system; the emergent combinations from the original FFVII’s endgame are mostly absent here, and rather it serves almost entirely as a method of equipping characters with options, which for a game with this deep of a combat system is completely fine. There are still a few interesting combinations, like how when you put an Elemental materia on your weapon linked with a green materia, and an HP Absorption materia linked to another copy of the same green materia, your basic attacks heal you. These aren’t the bedrock of the gameplay, though, and instead the system mostly serves to enable a variety of playstyles, which is still a worthwhile goal that it achieves fairly well.

In addition to the mostly-excellent combat, the game also has fantastic music and visuals. It’s a shame that the bulk of the game takes place in slums and samey-looking undercity areas, because the parts that take place elsewhere, like the reactors, motorways, and Shinra Tower, look jaw-dropping. It’s easily one of the best-looking games of the decade in terms of visual fidelity, and it’s a shame we don’t get to see more of the world of FFVII rendered in this way. Fortunately, Rebirth exists and is similarly stunning on a visual level, but Remake’s consistently samey, drab environments are sadly another casualty of the decision to focus the first part of the trilogy exclusively on Midgar.

All of this is to say that the combat is excellent and everything else sucks. As such, the game ends up a wildly mixed bag that is difficult to enjoy overall, because so many of the huge issues actively get in the way of someone just trying to enjoy the combat. This is why I almost enjoyed the game; when it was being a combat-focused RPG it was awesome, but that just made the segments where it was forcing you to swing off of monkey bars or do fetch quests all at once before they expire that much harder to push through. Thankfully, Rebirth exists, and has all of the amazing things about this game’s combat and more, while being far more willing to simply let you fight stuff, which is what these games are best at.

I really struggled to review this game. So many of my feelings on it seem contradictory, and so many of my thoughts are difficult to put into words. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game, but it had a couple of really terrible riddles, but those riddles didn’t impact the experience that much, except when they did, and the combat is great and understands the fundamentals of depth on such a solid level, but it still feels like it’s missing something, and the exploration and navigation are great and fascinating and awful and frustrating. The game is a mess of crazy ideas that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and it’s also a stripped-back, more focused take on the genre that gains so much depth while removing so many things. It’s hands down one of my favorite metroidvanias and I got every ending, but I had to struggle to push through towards the end. It sounds confusing, because it is, and this review is my best attempt at breaking down why all of these things can be true at once.

The thing is, Environmental Station Alpha is really two games in one. The first game consists of everything up until you reach the first ending, and the second game is everything after that. I’m going to start by discussing that first part, and this section of the review will be essentially spoiler-free. I will give a warning before discussing the second part, as it is impossible to do so without spoiling something about it.

The first part of Environmental Station Alpha is phenomenal. I contemplated giving it five stars - it’s not perfect, but it’s still easily the best imitator of the Metroid formula. It understands why those games work on a tonal and atmospheric level, and it consolidates its gameplay mechanics by toning down the complexity of the player’s toolkit but making each tool substantially deeper and more impactful.

In this game, you have only one weapon - a laser blast that hits directly adjacent to you. Via upgrades obtained throughout the game, it can eventually be charged to fire a much more powerful blast, and upgraded to fire three blasts at once in a conal pattern. One of the cleverest elements of the combat design here is the way that the laser functions essentially as a melee weapon, and the game refuses to give you any truly ranged options.

As a result of this, you’re forced to put yourself in danger in order to do damage, and in compensation, the enemies and bosses are designed in such a way that every single attack is reliably avoidable. The encounter design here is absolutely stellar, and some of the best I’ve seen in the genre. In spite of the simple toolkit afforded to the player, the enemies are complex and deep; they stress pattern reading, attack baiting, and careful movement in order to avoid taking damage. Environmental Station Alpha is a challenging game - it’s not brutally difficult, but many of its encounters put up a hell of a fight, and its levels are no slouch either.

Towards the halfway point, the game starts throwing some surprisingly tight platforming challenges at the player, and many of these took me multiple tries in order to complete successfully. You’re expected to understand and utilize your entire toolkit in an intelligent way, but you aren’t railroaded into a single possible solution; the tools you have are deep enough to allow for some flexibility, but the game still asks some skill of you.

In addition to the standard double jump and horizontal dash, you’re also given a hookshot and a vertical dash. This doesn’t sound like much, but the design of these tools is brilliant - they can be chained together in multiple ways that affect the kind of distance you can cover, and the hookshot alone is easily one of my favorite traversal mechanics in any game. It’s simple to use: it fires diagonally up and in front of you, at the same angle no matter what, and it releases automatically after a very short period of time, but it maintains your momentum as well as the distance between you and whatever you’ve grappled to, and as such there is an astonishing amount of variance in the trajectories and speeds that can be produced from it. Skilled use of the hookshot frequently eliminates the need for many other traversal tools, and it’s an incredibly rewarding skill to master as a result.

The navigation in Environmental Station Alpha is good, though I think the abundance of teleporters and the regularity with which the game pinpoints on your map exactly where you need to go next hold it back from being great in my view. The game also throws a couple of great navigational curveballs throughout the game, forcing you to find new paths to places you’ve already visited. This helps to keep navigation fresh in spite of the teleporters and waypoint markers.

In terms of atmosphere, the game is absolutely excellent - the ambience, music, and visual style of the game are all very peaceful, which contrasts nicely with the challenging combat and traversal, and the overall mood is just really powerful in general. Only a few of the music tracks are so amazing that I’d choose to listen to them on their own, but all of them service the tone of the game ridiculously well, and they contribute to an outstanding atmosphere throughout.

My overall biggest complaint with the first part of the game is that you will often be allowed to perform some kind of tricky challenge to reach a new area, only to find yourself unable to progress further until you find another upgrade. You might revisit an area with a new tool that allows you to cross one barrier, only to be met with another that you can’t cross yet, and when this happens it can be really deflating and frustrating. This isn’t a constant occurrence, but it’s a frequent enough annoyance that it feels like a flaw of the game at large.

Still, on the whole, the first part of the game is absolutely fantastic. It could maybe have used a few extra offensive options, possibly with some tradeoffs in their utility, but the overall craftsmanship is absolutely top-notch and easily makes for one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with this genre. So why isn’t this a five star review? Well, we still need to talk about that second part I mentioned earlier.

At this point, I feel the need to give a spoiler warning - I recommend completing the game at least once and playing for a few hours beyond that before you continue to read.

I recently played and reviewed a game called La-Mulana. In that game, progress was primarily gated by cryptic riddles that required thorough documentation and occasionally a fair amount of trial and error in order to solve. In the postgame of Environmental Station Alpha, many of the same principles are applied. As such, many of the same praises and complaints I had with that game apply here as well. I recommend reading my review of La-Mulana as I will not be reiterating all of the same points here - that review is largely spoiler-free and will give you a good feel for the kind of game that the second part of Environmental Station Alpha is practically modeled after.

Some have described this experience as akin to peeling back layer after layer to reveal deeper and deeper secrets. I think that’s a fairly apt description, as each step in solving the postgame of Environmental Station Alpha reveals further details about the world and generally requires the completion of the previous step in order to reasonably attempt to solve.

There are some really effective riddles here - I enjoyed translating the alien language, and I enjoyed parsing the clues given to find the locations to search for the game’s secrets. That being said, there were also some really terrible ones that were not properly telegraphed and required huge leaps in logic to reasonably solve, and unfortunately this brought down the experience to a significant degree.

One of the frustrating aspects of this part of the game is that in the process of solving its riddles, there isn’t much in the way of new areas to uncover and explore. There are a few, especially towards the very end, but a lot of the postgame involves running back and forth through areas you’ve already explored almost completely, except now with faster but less interesting movement because in order to reach this point you essentially need to have found the game’s final traversal powerup, the Dash Booster X.

A huge aspect of the appeal the first part of the game held for me was how interesting traversal was. Once you acquire the Dash Booster X, it immediately becomes by far the most effective and efficient method of traversal, and it’s unfortunately not very interesting - it allows you to spam horizontal and vertical dashes as many times as you want without ever needing to touch the ground. There is little depth here, and for the bulk of the postgame, you will be traversing the world primarily using this ability.

The postgame also removes the focus on combat almost entirely with only a few (albeit fantastic) exceptions, and shifts the focus so heavily to this riddle-solving idea that it’s almost jarring. It’s a fascinating experience and I found it difficult to put down for a while, but that doesn’t change how different the focus is compared to the aspects of the game that I really loved during the first part.

Towards the end, though, the game started to really wear me down, just like La-Mulana did. I had been spoiled regarding the existence of a few highly appealing secrets that I wanted to find, but I lacked the energy to go through all the trial-and-error to find them entirely on my own, so I resorted to using a guide. I think this external assistance improved my experience, which doesn’t reflect well on the game.

Still, the game had me hooked for many, many hours, and the experience I had towards the end didn’t really lead me to resent the game in the way I ended up resenting La-Mulana. This, I think, is the source of so many of my conflicting thoughts on the game. The first half is extremely strong, and isn’t really soured in any way by the existence of the second half. The second half has huge issues, but is ambitious and experimental and really effective in a few key ways. The hard part about evaluating the game is deciding whether the second half drags down the game overall, and to what degree.

Personally, despite my frustrations, I still look back on my experience with the game very fondly, and the rewards at the end of the second half are worthwhile enough that I can’t bring myself to hold it against the game all that severely. This game has some really cool ideas, yet it’s a strange case where the fundamental design is already minimalist, but removing parts of the game would still have made it better. In spite of that, Environmental Station Alpha still gets my strong recommendation, for simply being one of the highest quality metroidvanias I’ve ever played.