At first I thought of it as an equivalent to Hollow Knight for top down Zelda-likes, but I think that’s over simplifying it. It’s closer to something like Outer Wilds in how knowledge itself is a part of your progress, you learn things that you realize were there the whole time. What really makes this game unique though is the manual feature, how you find pages of it out of order, with only bits of it translated for you at a time. It gives you that feeling of when you were a kid, playing games with manuals, just jumping in without reading it, maybe going back and skimming over it, learning what you can do way later than you should have, then scanning it more thoroughly, learning hints and clues towards it’s hidden secrets, something the game is loaded with. The game’s graphics as well evoke the feeling of an old Playstation or N64 game, looking how you remember them looking in your mind, rather than how they actually looked, and especially with the in-game manual containing screenshots of the game taken through a CRT filter. All I have to complain about is the floaty combat. There’s a weird delay after most actions you perform in the game, but the animations don’t really do a good job conveying it so, especially with how aggressive the bosses can be, you find yourself in these awkward spots where your inputs don’t seem to be registering and you get screwed over because of it.

Overall a very unique, very creative, very quality game. I marked it complete because I beat the (apparent) final boss and got the basic ending, but it definitely feels like there’s a lot more the game is hiding from me, I don’t think I’m done with it yet.