Wasn't super interested at first but seeing the comparisons to games like Outer Wilds and the Witness piqued my curiosity. I've gotta say, I think those comparisons are a stretch. This is ultimately still just a metroidvania, even if it's more puzzles than combat. Felt more reminiscent of Tunic, borrowing some of those thinky elements but ultimately layering them on top of a more traditional game. While it has some clever mechanics, I was waiting for it to blow my mind and it just never happened.

Getting the items and uncovering the map was decently satisfying, but as it went on there were more and more situations that felt reminiscent of the worst moments in a Super Metroid first playthrough, where you've got no idea where you even can progress and so you end up just poking around, shooting rockets at every tile on the screen, hoping that this hidden passage isn't yet another missile stock upgrade, and the pacing screeches to a halt. I suppose this is me being a metroidvania hater and I'll cop to that. Had my fill.

After sleeping on it, I decided to give the postgame a fair shake. It was as tedious as I expected, full of backtracking and pixel hunting. The additional powerups didn't break the game open quite like I'd hoped, and accessing one of the postgame areas depends on RNG spawns, which, IMO, sucks ass. Maybe the idea is that you'd run into the thing over the course of the game, but it just didn't happen for me - only seeing it once, very early in the game. Ended up spending as long as the base game just to track down the odds and ends to get to a generally lackluster finale.

A gorgeous facelift of a game that needed a whole lot more. This is the kind of remake where the modern visuals work against the whole - the bad combat feels even worse because the game looks like it should know better.

There's also a funny relic of a bygone era in the checkpoint system: no heals. You don't get full health after dying, or even between stages; you keep whatever health you had when you reached the last checkpoint. Fair play, it's old school to a fault, I can respect that. However -

If you find yourself stuck with low health at the beginning of a stage, it's trivial to backtrack to a previous level to replenish health, but it also sucks shit. This is the kind of change remakes should enact to "bring it up to modern sensibilities" without "losing its essence" - nothing's lost by cutting pure tedium.

Inessential.