I went into this one with high hopes. The visuals are on point and the music is pretty good. But the more I played the more I realized that Corn Kidz 64 doesn't really improve on the classics that it draws inspiration from.

I think the most glaring issue is the camera. It goes from full control to fixed angles, and the controls are relative to it, which make some jumps where you lose control of the camera very hard to execute. The controls are also finnicky at points, but honestly not too bad, it only becomes annoying because the camera is so bad at times. Checkpoints are also a problem for me, at some points they are just before doing a bunch of setup before executing a series of jumps or whatever, and if you fail too many times, you die and get a game over screen, which restarts the world and make you do the entire setup again before going back to trying to advance. This leads to an experience with a very uneven pacing.

All these issues made me it hard for me to try and do any of the post game content. The thought of fighting with the camera again just made me uninstall the game.

I really don't know how puzzle games are still going for such a stale type of story. And it's not even a particularly well written one. Each of the characters only exists in the context of what is happening, even though the game uses the recordings you find scattered about to tell you bits and pieces of how their time inside the simulation was spent but it's always so shallow and so short.

Also now that I'm thinking more about it, I think that Cait was a below average companion, but at the time of playing he was so much more bearable than Jessie that I was grateful that now I only had to listen to him. And the fact that you can choose to just ignore Jessie's messages after Cait starts talking to you makes me think that the developers know how it could get annoying to hear her talk like that all the time. Her character almost feels like commentary on these types of interactions in other games and how obnoxious they can be, and how good it would be to just turn them off or ignore them.

I feel like while the difficulty curve on this is almost flat, there are some pacing issues that make progressing a bit annoying at times. But the puzzles themselves are really fun and imaginative. I wish there was more.

The tech, the environment and the puzzles are really special, it's just a shame that it's gone in the blink of an eye and that the story is so boring.