To cut a long story short: besides its gorgeous art and great music, the characters and their stories fall so flat that the rest of the game kind of falls with them. It feels more like a chore to play when all you have to look forward to after the battles is more wordy cutscenes where very predictable plot points feel stretched out with meaningless dialogue. Said battles were fine, nothing too stand-out about them, they work well, but those stories take a lot of emotional punch out of the music and make every town feel like it has no soul under the beautiful exterior. I still managed to finish all eight stories which shows there’s enough fun to be had to push through, but what’ll stick with me after finishing it is how aggressively basic these stories were and very little else.

The worlds you explore in this game gave me such an ethereal feeling of 'otherness' as I explored them that even after I finished the entire game, I couldn't quite place how they made me feel while exploring them. They are the star of the show, for sure. The puzzles then, are easy enough to put into motion once you've figured out the solution, though they get quite repetitive in their structure after a while. This game definitely benefits from its length in that sense, that the reptition is manageable because it doesn't take ages to get to the end.

All that said, this game didn't really leave me with anything once it was over. The puzzles were alright, the central concept was really cool, the worlds were truly stunning and left me speechless at times... and then it ended and I didn't really get anything out of it except the remnants of this vague feeling of 'wow'. It isn't even close to my favourite game I've played, but it is one of the few that has left me with such a distinct 'wow'-factor, and it's worth a try just for that if you're even remotely interested.

There’s satisfying difficulty, and then there’s spikes of frustration in a game that feels it was never designed to ask perfection from you… and this is clearly the latter. There’s no satisfaction to be had here past the music and the ending I fought so hard to get through all the frustration that I essentially couldn’t even enjoy how amazing the cinematic ending that we got actually was. As somebody who absolutely loved the base sonic frontiers, this was the most unwelcome surprise in a long while. You’d think more of the same goodness would be more than enough, but no, it’s made just for the people who love to suffer and bash their head into a wall for hours on end for little reward besides a decent ending… I really pray that they take lessons that making the next games ball-bustingly hard isn’t the way unless they’re way more tightly designed. When you feel like you’re fighting against the games jank and camera even in that stellar final boss and have obtuse game mechanics that were never explained before just to make the boss battle different… who really enjoys that, I wonder? What does the game gain from that sort of thing? It gains my frustration and in some part some genuine hate, that’s for sure.

Feels very smooth to play, if a little janky at times, and the story and characters work very well to get you invested. It doesn’t break any new ground, but I still think the main concept was very well explored and tackled here. The combat might not add much to the experience but it kept me focused and it just felt cool to slash at enemies as I zoom by. The big boss battles didn’t hit as hard as I thought they would but they were always a highlight, and thankfully flowed very well for me. The trick is to not hesitate, because the timing can be quite unforgiving and the camera a bit janky. Definitely recommended.

To put it bluntly, this game is all looks and no soul, just pretty but with no substance. It just felt kind of sluggish to play, with puzzles that are easy to figure out but take long to put the solution in because Lana moves realistically. At least it gave me a new appreciation for games like Inside, where the design of the puzzles and the world stood out where here it just feels like nature walking simulator but with robots everywhere that kind of grow stale too by the end of it.

I think what surprised me the most is how the two main characters, Lana and her lil cat creature Mui, try and fail to tug at the heartstrings. They have more character than the boys from Limbo or Inside (since those were really just player characters and not much more) but precisely because they do I noticed how I saw Lana as somebody seperate from me, with her constantly calling out for her sister getting rather more annoying than anything else. Mui is just cute, but there are no scenes to shape an actual bond between these two. Lana saves Mui, Mui follows her around, it doesn't really do anything extra to make us care for it besides the fact that Mui is the only defined character that is around for the whole game... and that character is a cat. They just needed a few more scenes of these two actually enjoying their time together, but what we get is just them existing side-by-side and us then being expected to cry or feel things because this creature is cute and Lana is but a smol child. There's no emotional core but it very clearly tries to hit you emotionally without putting in the work to shape any attachment to the world and the creatures in it.

It has nothing to say, it has very little to 'wow' you with, and if I want to walk around in nature realistically I either fire up Breath of the wild or better yet, I walk outside. I think I'm only this harsh on the game because Inside and Limbo showed me that this can be done much better.

Waited with playing this until I could convince someone else to play it with me but the level design, the enemies, the bosses, the overall gameplay loop where you have to quit out of co-op to go get items in shops that feel randomly thrown on a map… it feels like it wants to be monster hunter so bad but then absolutely fails when it comes to providing a smooth, fun co-op experience… and I’ve heard solo it’s just a spongefest of enemies. It looks nice I guess, the art is on point, but that’s about it. Feel free to skip.