The highest high I've gotten from a game in a long time, and the harshest anticlimax too. Like a train running full speed into a mountain.

It follows in that Fez/The Witness lineage of making you feel like an absolute genius for solving the puzzles, especially the later ones, because it trusts you to figure things out. The main gimmick of the game is the in-game instruction manual, which is written almost entirely in a fictional language but with just enough English to guide you in the right direction. It also does that satisfying thing where the puzzles redefine how you view the world itself while story events make changes to it. It's clever, and it means the backtracking is never a chore.

That means you spend a lot of time invested in this world. So when the ending is effectively a note from the developers that says "You won, good job :)" it rings hollow. There is an ending cutscene but it does not match the stakes at all.

What even were the stakes, though? Did I care about the story too much? Did the developers only intend for the events to have ludological meanings and not narrative ones? It's a simple story, no more complex than most SNES games, but it is a story. Maybe there's some Lore that would explain it if I spent more time digging. I have no indication it would be worth finding even if it is there.