short and fairly sweet with nice environments and chill music. neat dungeoncrawling, but surprisingly buggy and awkward at times in gameplay. the final boss was a little confusing but it worked well enough, though the bosses in general tended to be flaccid. guess i'll also mention that the aforementioned bugginess is part of what gets this a lower than average rating, as otherwise it'd be somewhere right in the middle.

kinda weird how few npcs there actually are in the game, especially since the long-winded writing mostly comes from rocks and bosses. i was hoping there'd be some cool writing to get out of this but it's so far beyond cryptic that even while looking out for it i didn't really get what was going on at all, nor was there enough dripfed to me for me to even come up with a theory. dunno, maybe there's lore in the second game or something. closest thing i got was just there being a loose connective thread of some of the characters healing from pain and avoiding pain? it fits with the title at least.

anyway i don't regret the 5 or so hours i spent in the game. i hope we get more games in this style as time goes on. i'm planning to make one myself at some point if i can get past my current projects. they're fun!