Made an account because I needed somewhere to write about this game after finishing it. I will try to remember to come back here and log all my other games and probably not write nearly as many words as this.

I was getting through the game fine enough for the first 4-5 hours; the combat, while occasionally grating, never got repetitive thanks to a large array of enemies. I also didn't mind the linearity of the platforming, even though the layout felt it was begging to be a sprawling Metroidvania. The Kickstarter page listed numerous inspirations but the two truest are Superbrothers and Ready Player One, the former in its (quiet pretty) pixel art and the latter in its synthwave album cover aesthetics and affect (though thankfully not references...mostly).

So for most of my time playing, the audiovisuals and combat were able to carry me through the blander platforming and storytelling. As the game went on though, I found my moveset for the battle scenes became far too complicated, with special moves feeling redundant (two separate, situation-dependent dash attacks) or awkward to use (maybe the worst uppercut in any video game). This is compounded in the late-game (starting with the train in the red zone) when enemies and bosses get ridiculously long patterns in their movesets, culminating in a final boss fight which has what feels like five or six different phases.

It's also around this point where the game's real story fell flat on its face. The intermittent flashback scenes - which despite some bizarre time jumps are at least respectable somber - become cloying and heavy-handed; you will never guess who Motherboard and Narita Boy are supposed to represent! Yet even that gets trampled by the tonal whiplash of the final ending, where it appears your mother was murdered by your father(??) before he offers you a Back to the Future reference and the credits roll. It's been a while since I remember playing a game that lost this much goodwill from me so fast.