Look, maybe this will make me come off as someone who can't take a joke or is taking this too seriously, but people talking about Ben Esposito's writing in Neon White reminded me of this game so I'm just going to say my piece.

I find it absurd that Arcane Kids pride themselves in being this super transgressive, subversive, "fuck you and everyone else" type group, and yet what they come up with here are jokes that Newgrounds cartoons and gamer webcomics have been making since the 2000's. Like, this is the target that needs to finally be taken down a peg, Sonic fans? Why does Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective feel more understanding of what Bubsy is than this feels understanding of what Sonic is? To be fair, the game does add a layer of surreal-ness and intentional discomfort to these jokes through it's interactivity and presentation, and that does make it a notch above like, Arin Hanson yelling at Big the Cat or whatever. But these jokes are just so immediately tired in my opinion, it's like making a game centered around Chuck Norris. And also, this complaint may sound silly to some, but like I said earlier, I never feel any actual care towards the Sonic series in this game. Bubsy 3D certainly was mean-spirited in a way, but this game just feels spiteful the whole time, and again, not in ways that are all that original.

The Arcane Kids manifesto insists to some extent to not take anything they do that seriously, and their games do feel like they mock the idea of trying to do so. So in that sense, I might be totally in the wrong for making these complaints. Maybe I'm even the exact kind of sucker they're making fun of. But just because a work of art markets itself as transgressive doesn't mean it can't also just be bad. Those t-shirts of Sonic smoking weed and it says "Chronic the Hemphog" on it offer more incisive commentary than this.

Turns out if you remake a bad game it still ends up being a bad game. What a surprise.

The biggest issue I have with this remake is that it tries to appeal to 2 different demographics at once: those who are a fan of traditional Adventure gameplay, and those who are a fan of the original Sonic 06. P06 tries to blend the "best of both worlds" together and I just don't think it works out well. More hardcore fans of the base game are gonna be put off by the control and mechanical changes, and the people who are more geared towards traditional Sonic Adventure are put off by the sluggishness everything still has compared towards the original Adventure games. It ends up appealing to not really either side in that regard, and for me personally """fixing""" 06's controls doesn’t really solve the plethora of issues I take with the original game. Like, Sonic actually having weight to his movement, actually reacting to terrain and being able to perform skips via spindash jumping again make this better than base 06 by default don't get me wrong, on top of some nice quality of life improvements like actually having air control in Mach Speed sections, but the movement is still too slow and limited for me to actually get invested. The spindash still sucks, the airdash still REALLY sucks, it just doesn't feel satisfying to play at all. Granted this game does give you the option to swap to a more adventure-esc spindash and airdash which I feel helps, but not by much.

My main issue is that at the end of the day this game is still trying to be somewhat faithful to base 06, whether it be mechanically or level design wise, and well...to say I'm not exactly the biggest fan of 06's level design and mechanics would be putting it lightly. Combat is still braindead and repetitive, the huge amount of automation is still present everywhere, these aren't ideas that are "really good actually" that would've been "fixed if the game wasn’t rushed!" - they're just bad ideas. The remake as a whole is undeniably impressive with the amount of effort that's been put into it, but in terms of gameplay I've been extremely unimpressed with what I managed to experience.