it's "fine" in its best moments. nothing too special or original at all. it's clearly inspired by cave story, which is totally acceptable, but the inspiration is mostly just in the graphics and music versus how the game feels to play. cave story has a smooth movement system with some momentum and multidirectional aiming and everything, while this doesn't. it's start and stop movement that just feels awkwardly stiff.

there's multiple weapons with different use cases that i can appreciate, but they all feel super weak and switching between them with just one button is clunky and annoying.

checkpoints are few and far between. with just 5-hits til you're dead, it's pretty annoying to replay the same section and over-encourages playing safely to the point that it's hard to enjoy the combat at all. this is especially a problem with the final section of the game, as it's one long segment with a full heal at the end, but no save before the final boss, so if you do die to that, you're SOL and have to replay the whole final section again.

i just wanted to play this as im interested in getting into the series especially with the most recent release that is allegedly a banger. i like going in order in a series regardless of quality of early entries, so i am ultimately glad i played this, but i really think you can probably skip out on this one.