(warning: kinda revealing on protagonist's role in the story, more implication than explicit, but)

An audio-visual masterpiece. The environments are gorgeous, so layered in scope. It's a pleasure to blast through the world, and even if the combat is a touch rote by the end, you can feel the effort and see the competent hands at work in every frame.

... I don't like the writing very much. I find myself longing for how muted Hyper Light Drifter was. I don't mind all of it. I mostly liked—if not loved—the performances, the secondary characters, the interstitials.

But the scattered storytelling afforded by audio logs you can technically collect in any order is genuinely a baffling choice. It necessitates an oblivious protagonist, at least as it's been executed here, and I had so much trouble connecting with Rei because of it. Her musings and observations are almost entirely divorced from the context of all the other things she's witnessed.

It's real armchair designer shit, but what this means to me is that she's not allowed to doubt her purpose. She's not allowed to sincerely interrogate what she's learning. She's accumulating discrete pieces of information, seemingly helpless to construct the bigger picture. Given the fraught nature of her mission, experiencing serious doubt about what's happening here is not only a sensible reaction, it's a prerequisite for a person to be believable.

I don't think it's a compelling way to frame your main character. I kept wanting Rei to follow a thought. You know? Like how you have a thought, and it establishes a chain of successive thoughts that leads you to something resembling a conclusion? You know, right? It's that thing people do. Even if it's a hassle sometimes, we more or less can't help it. She doesn't do that. Just flailing at an attempt would be enough.

She feels like a victim of the structure, a storyteller's pawn, not a person who makes choices.

And... even if there's an overriding reason for why she hardly ever reaches any conclusions, and she's simply deluding herself, I never got the sense that she's struggling with that delusion. I'd get it. I can understand what's going on, she can ignore the obvious, embroiled in that struggle. But that requires her to struggle.

Despite how overwhelmingly critical that all was, I did enjoy the game. It's worth playing just to see the space they've crafted. It's fantastic.

I don't think I like a single one of the systems they've added to this game post-launch. It's a shallow mess of unending tasks and upkeep. The relatively infinite cosmos at your fingertips, the wonder of space on tap, and they've furnished it with what feels like an insatiable fear that you might for one second be unoccupied. Unbothered.

If they let you hit a button to disable the mission log, and jettison most of the Fun to opt-in, that might be nice. Could be something. It's just incessant, the noise, the overtures beseeching you onto a plethora of colorful, ornate treadmills that all end up the exact same place.

Nowhere. They're treadmills.