Don't ever let anyone say your state of mind can't affect your opinion of something, because Banjo-Kazooie is proof that it can. The first time I played this a few years ago I was a cranky bitch who hated everything and wanted nothing more than for it to just end, but this time I actually stuck with it, got acclimated to its mechanics and levels and had a pretty good time as a result. I do think the movement feels somewhat sluggish and the levels are a little less free-flowing compared to something like Super Mario 64, but I've come to accept that it's trying to do its own thing. Its own thing might be occasionally repetitive or frustrating, but rarely does it feel uninspired or broken. 100%ing was a great big pain in the ass, but I'm still glad I gave it another chance. I probably would have kept being the same cranky bitch about it otherwise, and no one likes that.

The true value of a game lies in what it leaves the player with after they've put it down. It follows thus, that the true job of any game developer, and by extension any artist, is to metaphorically fuck the viewer's mind and blow a hot sticky load of memetic material straight into their fertile cortical folds, ensuring the propagation of many healthy spiritual progeny. It was by this process of inspiration-impregnation that games like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk cum to be, and if Bomb Rush Cyberfunk went to my school I definitely would have bullied the ever-loving shit out of him for having such a stupid name. ButtFuck CyberTruck, CumSlut SiphonSpunk, Homestuck FuckingSucks, and possibly my favorite, ButtMush FiberFlush. I would be merciless, it would be so bad that he would go home early every day and his dad, Tony Hawk, would find him brooding in his room listening to old mixtapes on the Naganuma-compatible cd player his dead mother, Jet Set Radio, left behind. Tony didn't get why the boy held on to that stupid thing, and he could never figure out why that made him so goddamn mad. The way Jet Set Radio's eyes would wander when she did the pornstar grind, he knew she was putting on a show, but it wasn't for him. Now that I think about it, damn kid doesn't even look like me, doesn't trick like me... but the way he manuals, gliding effortlessly, perfectly balanced. I didn't teach him that. That's not skating, it's mockery, and I'm the one looking a fool, because he knows what I've always suspected but could never confirm, that I'm a real WashedUp SkaterCuck. You think you can hurt me? I've got news for you, kid: pain made the hawk a goddamn legend.

The belt lashes came hard and without warning, but Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's face remained a flat and inanimate mask. As the belt clattered to the floor, Tony hocked a loogie and spat on the poor skater.

"You're not even worth beating."

Bomb Rush starts the way you would expect every good gangbang to end, the team clearly poured a lot of love into that opening. It's a bold and bedroom-eyed promise for your forty bucks, but that's where the pretense drops and you're pop-n-locked in for 8 hours of mostly going through the motions. There's grinding, getting railed, turning tricks, and a dribbling climax, which admittedly feels kinda okay, but you gotta endure two awkward hours of post-nut clarity that leaves you wondering if "kinda okay" is the best you'll ever get, just like my fucking ex. Thanks, Lucy.

For a game about criminally defacing public property to unilaterally prescribe which sanitized street art jpegs you're allowed to raise the property value with... well, it sure as hell isn't vandalism, but it may as well be robbery for depriving the world of a better game. It's missing the point of graffiti so profoundly that I struggle to think of anything funnier to say other than to merely state as a fact that Jet Set Radio, the borrowed heart and soul of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, HAS a graffiti editor.

There is a version of this game where I could have taken a sniper bullet to the head and had my corpse stomped on by metal gear because I painted a mural of Mario spreading his gaping anus over New Amsterdam, and the world of gaming is poorer to have never gotten it.

But hey, modding would be hella boring if it the devs supported it.

Does anything remotely successful

Slippi: ᵀʰᵃᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᵗʰᵉ ᵇᵉˢᵗ ᵗʰⁱⁿᵍ ᴵ’ᵛᵉ ˢᵉᵉⁿ ᶠᵒˣ! ʸᵒᵘ’ʳᵉ ˡⁱᵗᵉʳᵃˡˡʸ ᵗʰᵉ ᶜᵒᵒˡᵉˢᵗ ᵍᵘʸ ⁱⁿ ᵗʰᵉ ʷᵒʳˡᵈ!!

Falco: Yeah anyone could’ve done that you little bitch. Do us all a favour and die you imbecile

Peppy: Good job. Your father is dead

call me an 11 year old who just found out postal was a thing but for the life of me i can't stand most cartoonsy-scrimblo-bimblo games like banjo-kazooie, mario, etc etc but i feel like the first two rayman games, beyond just being very nostalgic for me, have a more defined sense of fantasy without being over-the-top with smiling clouds, trees and loud sound effects or trying to put a joke between every word, it just feels like a wonderous world not pandering particularly to kids. not only that, this game in general is probably the definitive 3D platformer of its time and to this day. it pulls off everything right, from the controls to the pacing to the collectathon mechanics and you get fairly immersed in this small rebellious world. i really doubt that you will hate this if you at least like action games and haven't completely forgotten how childlike joy feels like, as close as many of us are to that

Damn, sometimes it's good to be wrong. I remember rolling my eyes and groaning when this game was first announced: procedural generation, rogue-lite, female protagonist in a sci-fi setting, been there, done that. Then I played it and almost immediately became a fan. The graphics are gorgeous, the gameplay loop is solid and addicting, the weapons are punchy and satisfying, the atmosphere is thick and foreboding, the controls are spot on even with a controller? HOW??? I don't know what black magic they're cooking with in Finland (maybe they just had Sargeist blaring in the studio) but they should keep doing it.

EDIT:
Knocked off a half star because Act 3 is weaksauce.

(i put some hot tips on playing chulip at the end of this review and i beg you to look at them, if nothing else here, if you are planning to play this!!!!)

moon, chulip's predecessor that laid the foundation for its general gameplay and writing style, is a game about "love" in a broad sense. you must observe people, hear their thoughts on things/others, give items, and practice good timing and patience while each tick of the timer brings you closer to "death". you give "love" and in turn receive it as a kind of experience, which as it accumulates allows the player-character to persist in the world for lengthier periods of time. the idea behind this "levelling up" with love, to extend this life timer, is that love is what drives us to exist at the most fundamental level.

moon ties its passivity of the player into a critique on rpgs' getting experience through violence and its obfuscation of that violence, and forms much of its identity around this. despite some uneven execution, i do think its statement of intent that comes out of this critique, taken more broadly a thesis on what we take from games in general, makes moon an incredibly passionate game in own right. but its kind of passivity presents its own problems to me; you become an intangible ghost in moon's world, impervious to all its elements EXCEPT for time. it presents its own challenges for the player through with the concept of passing time, but because its only really the timer and being patient enough you'll have to worry about (and you practically forget about the timer once your love level is high enough), i do feel like there's some lack of complexity to moon's definition of "love" past this. this lack unfortunately lends itself to simplistic woobified arguments for moon that arent totally its fault, that its a cutesy escapist sim patterned after animal crossing, revolutionary just because its non-violent, smoothing out the complexities and contradictions that do exist within the game.

yoshiro kimura, one of moon's three main designers and the one responsible for the bulk of its script, would go on to found punchline and create its first game, chulip, after suffering a health crisis and travelling the world (not sure in which order, but i think both inform this game's figurative/literal troubles of the heart and its internationalism, respectively). chulip is one of three spiritual sequels to moon along with giftpia (by moon designer kenichi nishi's skip inc) and endonesia (by moon designer taro kudo's vanpool), all three of which lift moon's "love" gathering mechanic but ditch the rpg critique to utilize it for stories about growing up and adolescence...at least from what i can tell, because only chulip has an english translation. i believe giftpia is about considering what path one takes to realize they are an adult, and i believe endonesia frames adulthood as an understanding of one's own emotions and rejecting escapism, but i'd love to be able to understand their text fully someday and see for myself. the point is, all of them take moon's bedrock and mechanically and narratively add their own spin and layers of complexity beyond that original game's meta, genre-defying statement.

chulip frames adolescence as "learning how one can attain happiness"...which can be interchangibly interpreted as attaining love, since the game revolves around getting kisses and all, but happiness is the operative word that comes up time and time again. its a harsh world, one of artists unhappy that their dreaming days are long gone or contending with leaving them behind, working adults unhappily fighting over scraps of money no one can get, lovers unhappily separated by death that came too soon, workers unhappy to be stuck in dead end jobs in perpetuity, people with secret passions and vices unhappy that they cant be known, students of life so unhappy that they shut themselves off from the world, so on. the main goal is attaining a lasting happiness in winning over a girl you saw in your dreams, and to do that you need to strengthen, i.e. "level up", your heart by getting practice kisses from everyone else in the game.

to make the player understand the world as one that tests happiness, to take them out of complacency that stems from being nothing more than an observer, moon's timer is replaced with hp, heart points. same basic idea as health but damage is not just physical (though it often is), but emotional too: when you get yelled at, overhear a snicker at something you did wrong, pick up a gross RNG poopie out the trash, you take damage. a game over in chulip is not becoming starved of energy like in moon, but becoming heartbroken. chulip teaches that finding happiness is a difficult journey that requires a vulnerability to pain that moon largely shields you from. you must learn how to deal with being hurt, sometimes to the point of wanting to give up, much like its underground residents seem to have. but even they have moments where they want to come out and be happy. thus the game is not just about comfortably observing examples of love in the world, but exposing yourself to an often unkind world to find happiness, to both enjoy the smaller moments and to become closer to a revelation of oneself.

so the elephant in the room: chulip's reputation. that it wastes the players time constantly, that its puzzles are cryptic to the highest degree and its never clear what to do, and that its viciously eager to hurt the player in many different ways until they die and lose progress. even people who found something to love in moon--itself a time wasting, highly cryptic game--would say chulip has worse design. moon can be accepted for its supposed wholesomeness, but then chulip by comparison is downright abusive for daring to be a cute game about gaining love from others that then has you taking figurative and literal blows from them constantly, and discouraging exploration when the most harmless seeming, insignificant interaction might hide an unwelcome, barbed wire surprise. i have heard all this, considered it carefully, and decided i am far too in love with chulip's whole being to care or even think of most of it as actually bad. i cant think of this game as truly mean-spirited when it sincerely makes me laugh, humbles me, and has this aura that kept me from ever being mad at it for too long. its entire essence envelops me, making everything it throws at me feel utterly right with what it kind of experience it is.

im playing the trangressive design card here somewhat, one usually used for more self-serious, "cooler" experiences in which theres no real question about their intentionality--pathologic, nier/drakengard, certain kill the past games spring to mind. its wasting time is inherited from moon, both sharing an unconventional design element in having the player feel time go by passively, so that even boredom adds color to a world as it turns with or without you (though chulip having no timer makes waiting around by itself less of a problem, the one "non-stressful" edge over moon). i find its even more cryptic puzzles are actually more fitting than moon's, or any other adventure game i can think of, because its obtuseness is so over the top and specific to itself when taken altogether that it feels hilariously in tune with the strange and opaque nature of the characters and the world. same can be said for its threats to your health from every corner; im drawn into the world when it strikes back, not simply out of some dour sense of brutal reality, but because its jokes hit that much harder when you mechanically feel the punchline (heyyo). im not saying all of this is intentional, though i think more of it is than its been given credit--dont even get me started on the factory as a simulation of grueling tedious work--but it doesn't matter to me when so much of what might not be intended just works so magically for me. all of it adds up to become THE single best work of comedy ive ever found in games, slapstick with uncanny timing, bewildering beyond belief in its impish way.

not to mention that this is a love-de-lic like we are talking about; an airtight clockwork construction of character-based narrative design with an incredible level of detail to discover on your own, genuinely deserving of greater appreciation. will always love the planning out of what to do that happens in my head with every daily commute to different areas, working my way through the showa-era diorama of long life town with its lovely rustic atmosphere. its mundane ritualisticness got nailed into me as i played and became insanely endearing; getting up, passing michelle beside the empty lot dream girl is living in, going under the train tracks where that fortune teller is, walking by the fountain up the stairs to the station, buying a ticket from the two-faced man and then waiting for the train...soothes my autistic brain like nothing else. the goddamn SOUNDTRACK and SOUND DESIGN is taniguchi arguably at his very best, full of variations on that one theme of the entire world of the game thats seemingly composed to be perfect biding-your-time music. AND its a game so tantalizingly bursting with secrets that i have played it and replayed it often these past 5 years, and in all these years, i have only been able to go a few months at most before i find or hear about something i never found before. not kidding, i literally found something new the week before i wrote this. ok full on rambling at this point ill wrap up

im too stubborn to make concessions, or to fall back on ironic appreciation. i love chulip immeasurably, it epitomizes so many of the feelings within games that i want to explore most, as a singular and highly considered vision within the medium that ALSO reveals this medium's tendency towards fraught, confused architecture. an intricate piece of simply spoken poetry with a wonderful rhythm of life to it, yet brutally and hilariously esoteric as can be. looking back on an embarrassing temporary defeat and laughing, listen to the sounds of your hometown at night, speaking honestly and being true to yourself to others, all of these have happiness in them. the rules of love are the rules of the universe, the rules of the universe are the rules of long life town.

SOME TIPS:

- im not going to say you wont need a walkthrough and i dont blame people for using one BUT dont assume this game wont give any hints on how to do anything. i would say to try a walkthrough only when you feel like youve exhausted your options, especially if it isnt related to an underground resident or the "main quest". when you need a guide i recommend using the fandom wiki for help, as gamefaqs is ocassionally misleading.

- tying into the above, i cannot stress enough that the third rule of love suzuki mentions is extremely, EXTREMELY important. you follow that rule by showing items and name cards to people in long life town, you can buy blank business cards from the shop next to the train station. if you engaged with moon's name cards/item showing system, you probably understand, but id argue its even more crucial in this game. take in and learn as much as you can.

- the english localization makes the game playable but it is incomplete and downright bugged in places (i still love how its deadpan delivery makes everything feel extra bizarre, even if things were translated too bluntly). the worst offender is that it left out a major hint for a main quest, which ill tell you about here: you'll find a computer that displays a message onscreen, that message is "dempou soccer".

- save often. in new areas, prioritize kissing residents who clean toilets. this game can kill you easily especially early on, tread carefully until you have more hp and health items to recup from blows.

“In the process of becoming an adult, there comes a moment for each of us when we’re rejected by the ‘world.’ The person we were so in love with dumps us. The school we wanted to go to so badly doesn’t let us in. The career we were trying for doesn’t pan out. Everyone has a moment like that. And that’s okay. There’s no such thing as something which mustn’t be lost. Everyone has the freedom to love someone or something. We are free. We mustn’t forget that.” - Kunihiko Ikuhara

I really, really had to play this game as soon as I finished moon. I was enamored by the sincere love that the game espoused without ever becoming sappy, and that clearly carries over into Chulip’s kissing quest. Much has been written about Chulip as a story about the pains of emotional vulnerability that is necessary to learn to truly love someone, and I HIGHLY recommend ludzu’s review of the game for more detail on that. But besides love, I think another keyword shared between the two games is “perspective”: moon was about the perspective of a player who breathes life into stock RPG characters, while Chulip is about the oddities of adulthood from a child’s perspective.

I really dislike the “wow Japanese games sure are CRAZY!” Orientalist mindset but this game truly is offbeat. The childish innocence of the protagonist is frequently pitted against some surprisingly adult subjects such as ennui, alcoholism, and domestic violence among others, but the game never loses its sense of levity in the face of them. I can’t fault anybody for finding some scenes tactless, but I think it’s integral to the commitment to a child’s perspective being simplistic and lacking nuance. A phrase in the main story that really stuck out to me is “adults have problems too”, and a huge part of the game as a coming-of-age story is learning of these dark aspects of adult life.

Chulip tears down any pretense of logic in adult society. Why does the bathhouse owner find it so important to follow a seemingly arbitrary ritual to take a bath “the correct way”? Why does the wife yearn to be with her husband even after he hit her? These questions aren’t answered as they’re beyond the comprehension of a child, but the protagonist does know he wants to make everybody happy. It’s nostalgic of childhood in two contradictory ways: at once, it’s about growing from egocentric adolescence to a mature person who can make personal sacrifices for others’ gain, but it’s also about how much simpler it was to love someone as a child without the boundaries of logic, illustrated best by the sickeningly sweet crush the protagonist has on his love interest, the only other child with dialogue in the game.

I’ve become fascinated with Yoshiro Kimura as a “gaming auteur”, especially after learning he directed one of my childhood favorites Little King’s Story, itself a rather childlike understanding of what it is to be a ruler not unlike Chulip. The language of his games perfectly captures that magic feeling of childhood, makes adults contemplate what they may have lost when they grew up, but doesn’t patronize while maintaining such a sweet tone. Consider me entranced by his ability to tap into my inner child’s heart in such a mature and thoughtful way.

Policy

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In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.

Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.

Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.

You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.

Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.

We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.

The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.

We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.

Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.

On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.

The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.

With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.

Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.