good, not great, but a very promising start to what i hope is finally sonic gaining momentum in his games again. twice now we've been burned by sonic getting one good game followed up by awful shit, but i'm hoping this'll finally break the sonic cycle for good and get the gaming sphere to a point of wider respect for him and his series again.

the sheer amount of respect for the source material here is great, though the amount of references got grating at times. the amount of cost-cutting asset flips and rather sparse overworld design is also a bit sad, but i think the moment-to-moment exploration and movement tends to feel great. my only real issues there are that the game forces you into 2d areas sometimes on the overworld, sonic only ever has jumping momentum when flying off a rail or a hill with boost, and that overworld minibosses will slow the game down suddenly when you get near them. those things don't really impact the game much in the grand scheme of things, though, so it's not so bad.

i think more than anything else i'm curious where we're going to go from here. even before playing this game i was wondering this, and now that i've experienced it all i wonder the same thing but with a bit more education behind it. there's enough random loose ends and intentional hooks put into the game for a continuation that i can't help but be (cautiously) excited. with any luck, though, we'll get another game that improves vastly upon this proof of concept, and it'll be glorious. just... don't have so many random input delays for stuff like homing attacks and menus next time, please.