The understandings that come between characters worlds apart, rendered blissfully through everyday life, from absurd to natural. Nasu's most interpersonal poignant work I feel, largely by nature of being invested in the day-to-day growth between its cast, reflecting on people throughout their days of steely clouds, fallen snow, and fairy tale amusement parks. Ever more blissfully held up by how Type Moon's characters are given such vibrancy, with each interaction always flowing off the page for me into a real group of multifaceted people ^/w/^

I will admit though, that I found myself wishing there was more to chew on than what's here. There's a crazy good juxtaposition between the changing architecture, the diametrically opposed functions of old and new, nostalgic and living-in-the-present, but it ends up becoming more cornerstones of the players of life rather than delved into thinkpieces. Which is largely the point, after all, as this is coming-of-age in its truest form. Everything is open, wide, and turning pages into a more difficult cityscape that demands resolution from you as you're just starting to figure out what you're looking for. And in that way the platitudes, the stories of making the most of your life, the ending divvying up of regrets you still have of the life you've led so far, all culminate together into something deeply fulfilling.

It's a wonderfully graceful work with all that. I'll really have to think on it a lot more as I leave it.

Genuinely the best feeling 3D platformer I've played innnnnn gotta be at least 5 years. It's, just, pouring out the seams with charm and earnest love, to the point where the polish feels homemade with its partly-crusty lining. Sometimes for woe though, of course, like when the geometry can ~occasionally~ disagree with your particular momentum and existence. Otherwise it feels as clean as it should be!

It has the makings of doing the Super Mario Odyssey flowchart of hat-tricking, but with detours and digressions from that linear track, encouraged both for score and conserving momentum. Sonic but not-quite-Sonic sprinklings on top, and that all flows together phenomenally. What's altogether more stunning though is it's the only work of its ilk that bothers to really have "level design." There's real guidance through its stages in a way that lets you go absolutely hogwild with its toolkit without ever being 'too open' or 'too constrained.' You can reasonably skip as much as you'd like to by mastering the speed of yo-yo tricks well enough, but there's always some things you Need to do. It's so super encouraging of going for the One-Combo 100% run through its stages, to the point where I actually went and did a few. I can't say a game like this has done that to me! It helps that the music is so bouncy and blissful, and stages never outstay their welcome to where the prospect of "you need to do this entire stage again" is a "absolutely hun let's do even better this time".

My only ~real~ issue is that the swinging and twirling, sadly, lacks enough bite, at least for me. I don't think there's a single stage or moment where the game challenged me, and this is AFTER doing every bonus stage. Sure I can do the one-combos and those can be difficult but with all the skips it's only really as hard as I let it be? Even though it's not uncharacteristic for such a clearly soft platformer, I find myself so unsatisfied with the lengths the game really went to, especially when the final boss was more of a wet fart than a real demonstration of the game's skills, or like, your performance as an artist!!! Give it an encore! A real spicy star road!

started to see the vision once I realized the grab (your only verb outside of jumping) gives you i-frames when you bounce off of whatever you're grabbing... pretty cool wrinkle on an otherwise plain set of mechanics. a lot of the game is carried by the dense mix of geometric terrain and organic outgrowths a la sonic; it's no surprise that much of this team got rolled into sonic team for NiGHTS into dreams the year after. said team really demonstrates their technical aptitude as well, with some stunning overlapping parallax on stages such as planet automaton and swirling line scrolling in the background of the itamor lunch fight. ristar emotes fluidly, with his walking scowl morphing into a grin and twirl upon defeating hard enemies. occasionally he'll even show a penchant for childlike play, such as in this snowball fight setpiece.

a first impression yields something a little dry on the gameplay front, with single-hit enemies and slow movement compounding into something more leisurely than interesting. thankfully around the halfway point the design veers into level-unique puzzles and setpieces. the one that stuck out to me the most was a series of areas in planet 4 involving babysitting this radio(?) item across various hazards in order to give to various birds who want them blocking your way. presages a klonoa style of puzzles built from manipulating objects in the environment rather than working with pre-defined aspects of the player's toolkit. near the end the game veers into some execution challenges as well, with mixed results. ristar's grab actually has a lot more going on to meets the eye: not only does he have the aforementioned i-frames, but he also gains a bit of height off his bounce, and he can hold onto some interactables indefinitely, swinging back and forth using his arms as a tether. the former gets used for a couple climbing challenges jumping between walls and swinging poles, which makes for some pleasant execution trials in the midst of the level-specific stuff. the latter never gets expanded on quite as much, probably because ristar maintains no momentum from his swinging when he releases due to bouncing back off of the fulcrum he's attached to, so actually manipulating the technique to achieve certain bounce angles is a bit unintuitive.

bosses are neat across the board; while somewhat cycle-based, the designers trickle a couple small points for attacking them before they're obviously wide-open. some of these (I'm thinking of specifically the bird boss on planet 4 and its array of non-linear projectiles) encourage the i-frame abuse in interesting ways. by the end of the game, however, it seems like they expect you to exploit it pretty openly to get anywhere, and by that point the bosses end up becoming grab spam. definitely makes the fights fly by quicker, but I find myself preferring the more cautious approach I took during the earlier bosses, although I would imagine upon a replay some of the same techniques apply.

I've got real admiration for the theatrical trappings, with panels falling off the back wall and gyrating stagehands gussying up the set as you stroll through, but I think coming back to this style of gameplay doesn't hit the same for me anymore. the treasure hyperfocus on impressive boss fights is here without the richer mechanics of gunstar heroes or alien soldier, leaving much stricter scenarios where the player has less leverage over the proceedings. it's heavily setpiece-driven and thus built upon cracking open whatever essential strategy solves each individual encounter rather than learning particular mechanics over the course of the game. a good example would be izayoi, who has a rapid arm extension attack that aims for your head, so if you throw your head above you right when she starts tracking, you can repeatedly have her whiff and then bop her in the face when she briefly exposes it afterwards. that's a cool little extension of the game's primary mechanic (you can throw your head in any direction), but once you lock it in the repetition of her behavior pattern and her cyclically available weak point make the fight rather static.

not sure what to think of the different abilities you can get with various heads throughout either. theoretically I could've enjoyed having them woven in through enemies or something else organic a la kirby, but having the abilities just sitting out in the open right where you need them feels a bit raw. it's especially apparent given how few there are that alter mobility or do anything other than make combat easier; perhaps a bit of tunnel vision on the developer's part, even though you can tell they attempted some actual level design here. you may get a sequence with some wall-climbing thanks to the spiky head ability, but these segments boil down just to "scale the wall with the powerup" without many complicating factors thrown in aside from a late-game segment where you use it to stall on the ceiling and avoid rocket trains zooming by. the way that abilities are applied in the boss fights also fall into a narrow paradigm, with more than a few bosses having abilities sitting around that effectively shut them off: time stop in multiple fights, both a bomb with crazy damage and invincibility in the aforementioned izayoi fight, and the hammer in both rever face and the final boss fight. really something where some sort of trade-off regarding grabbing the ability would've made more sense; the developers settled instead of interleaving junk abilities in the rotating ability selection that will inevitably cause you to eat a lot of damage until they wear off.

obviously with mikami at the top of the masthead on this one it's very tempting to extract the seeds of resident evil and his later titles out of this one. hmmm... limited inventory, you say? narrow corridors with dangerous enemies that you have to expend limited ammo against or lure away through subtle AI manipulation?? all these environments that loop back on themselves... you can really see the sketches of the spencer mansion here...

but really, it's heavily streamlined zelda in the same way quackshot is heavily streamlined metroid. the structure is effectively five dungeons in the classic single-screen room format strung along with some cute cutscenes of goofy and max trying to rescue pete and pj from a group of pirates. there's no resource management; exiting and reentering a room resets the majority of its state, which includes various throwable objects used to attack enemies. occasionally a puzzle will affect something in the next room over, but by and large every room here is a self-contained puzzle, ranging from "clear all the enemies" to push-block puzzles to a couple things in between. they're pretty solid too: the push-block puzzles often require using certain blocks to line up others, keeping the mapping of routes from becoming rote, and since clearing a room requires paying attention to where throwables are located and how to access them, some cool ideas arise from determining an order of attack and manipulating enemies to assist you with killing others. AI manipulation puzzles are a thing as well, ensconced into the game's toolkit with a bell item that draws aggro and thus controls enemy movement. the concepts stay remarkably fresh throughout, although given that the game is only a couple hours long, it would be tedious if this wasn't the case. a couple favorites of mine would be ones where you trick enemies into walking into oncoming fire from cannons and a particular one where you line up four enemies in a corridor to kill them with a single sliding block.

beyond throwing items and kicking blocks, goofy can hold two items at any given time to assist in particular puzzles. other than the bell one mentioned earlier, the hookshot serves the most "interesting" purpose of the bunch, as it can both stun enemies and create tightropes. not exactly exhilarating, but its latter purpose consumes the item, making searching for new hookshots an additional intrigue that drives exploration. beyond these the applications lack substance; the candle widens the sight radius in infrequent dark rooms, keys are just keys, and shovels can be used to farm life-up items in some rare locales with movable dirt. in this way the restriction of holding only two items at once becomes less demanding, since the latter set are so situational that holding onto them longer than a room or two will always be a waste. by the late game item-reliant puzzles give way to ones that leverage the game's inherent mechanics, so it seems like the designers figured this out as well.

Music highlight. Tim Follin, you can't save this. I can promise though, I sunk a good few hours in because the OST is great.

Really telling that this is sitting at a cool 6/10 despite most people likely never figuring out what the potions did (essential) or how to jump-grab or drop-jump. Not a single mention of the nearly frame-perfect waiting sections with oscillating spike-balls, the spawn-in death traps, or the borderline item softlock (I elaborate on this one in the description)

I'm a Zelda II defender (4/10) and I love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (8/10) for its masterfully tight design and satisfyingly brutal difficulty, but every other chamber in Solstice by comparison is full of "gotchas" and absurdly tight windows that are made worse by the isometric view obfuscating their actual location. You can infer a lot of locational stuff, but only so much; there's a reason platformers nearly entirely avoided this perspective even back in the day, opting for either top-down or side-view.

I can't help but feel like you're better off playing one of the adventure games of the 80s and 90s instead if you want a "vibes-based exercise in trial and error."

When I was younger, I thought Dead Space 2 was the usual case of a horror game starting incredibly strong and then weakly limping to the finish, but this most recent playthrough has totally inverted my opinion; while the first half gets all the nicest areas and flashiest setpieces, it’s the second half, where you’re funneled through the metal guts of the station, that the encounters start to pick up, with a wider range of enemies to deal with and a playful sense of meanness to the combat design- like a memorable room where the game spawns an explosive enemy right next to a breakable window that’ll send you out into the vacuum of space if you so much as touch it. The final section is amazing as well, chased by a regenerating necromorph that gets the best use out of your busted kit out of all the challenges in the game, forced to push through hordes of enemies while this unstoppable enemy is constantly shadowing you.

But all this should be couched in the fact that many of its best moments here hover around the opening 30 minutes of RE4- you’ll be really lucky if you’re fighting multiple waves of enemies or have to make meaningful decisions of who to prioritize first in combat, the designers seemingly all too comfortable to throw the standard melee and acid-spitting necromorphs at you and a haphazard assortment of the other enemy types as a little bit of flavor. Some of this flattening is due to how powerful your Stasis ability is: because so many of the encounters take place in this tiny corridors and cramped hallways, it’s really easy to negate the threat of an ambush or poor positioning by freezing an enemy and dismembering them with little thought on your part, aided by how generous the game is with dropping stasis packs and doling out recharge stations. It’s something especially felt with the Stalker enemies, a standout addition deemed so important that they get their own dedicated rooms, but they end up being some of the simplest in practice- boiling down to hunkering in a corner and waiting for them to run at you, a cool enemy type that feels unfinished when fought on their own. (The fact that you never fight these guys while dealing with your O2 meter is a massive shame, something that might’ve curbed how easy it is to passively engage them.)

Maybe the most damning thing here is that the weightlessness of the new additions to the bestiary highlight just how well-considered the original’s enemies were, testing you on the applications of the dismemberment system and on third-person shooting in a way none of the new creatures do- the frantic, vertical movement of the scorpion-like Leapers or the surgical precision demanded for the Pregnant necromorphs, diluted here with a lot of stuff that swarms you and that can be beaten out more simply with direct damage. A lot of the discussion about the two games centers on the weakening of the survival horror elements from the first entry to the second, but I think this less defined mechanical identity is probably the bigger loss for the series.

Still, a hard game for me to really dislike- nails the feedback for combat (even reloading looks cool!) and I’m not sure if another game has had a better justification and visualization for the combat tunnel/amazing skybox/combat tunnel structure than working your way through the various sectors of a dystopian mining station. Was ultimately reminded a lot of my time going through Titanfall 2 a few years ago, a strong string of setpieces and a great-feeling avatar not able to shake the feeling that the encounter design never really pushed the mechanics far enough.

Extra thoughts:

- Played through the game on Zealot, and got about halfway through on the limited-save Hardcore difficulty before losing a couple of hours of progress when I clipped through the floor of a tram and opted to call it there. Otherwise, I think these are pretty admirable difficulty modes, the increased lethality and reduced ammo of the former and the endurance needed for the latter do a nice job at recontextualizing the game. Granular bits of optimization, like being able to use random kinesis objects to slowly bludgeon enemies to death and getting a free refill on ammo and health when you upgrade their capacity, turn into run-saving maneuvers when you're under so much pressure. Good stuff.

- The Severed DLC is slightly more respectable than I remembered- the stasis enemies from Dead Space 1 aren’t a super-noticeable addition, but going backwards through old areas is far less egregious than it sounds, both due to some nice enemy arrangements (probably has the best Stalker encounter in the game) and for the fact that the player character comes with a predefined loadout that might get you to see a different side of the arsenal. Would never have used the Seeker rifle otherwise, for instance.