Beautiful and crisp presentation of a multi-layered world riddled with secrets, but not quite what I was looking for. The combat didn't work for me and I underestimated how important the secrets are to progression.

Fraught combat dominates the game, halting the fun of exploration. Enemies have movement patterns that clash with the environment and geometry; it seems like encounters were designed with larger arenas in mind. The range of the melee attack is painfully short, demanding precise movement in a game where things feel a bit floaty. Windups, telegraphs, and triggers are inconsistent, which means a lot of time can be lost to learning each enemy's individual quirks. Lastly, the choice to inflict double damage while out of stamina pours salt into the wound; it seems like an attempt to prevent roll-spamming, which I suspect is needed because otherwise you could skip too many encounters. It all adds up the sort of difficulty that, while it can can be mastered, felt at odds with the elements of the game I enjoyed.

I love the many hidden alcoves and interconnected pathways throughout the world; discovering these was a pure joy and there's many routes to try. Progression eventually depends on decoding a secret language. I'm happy to take notes or draw a map if needed, but decryption is a step beyond what I'm willing to do. it's possible that if I weren't bumping up against the combat so much I may have had more room for this kind of intrigue, but the combination of opaque roadblocks with frequent deaths pushed me out of the experience before it had a chance to get its hooks into me.

suffers from all the fatal gameplay flaws of modern JRPGs. benefits from incredible art direction and lovely cities. special shoutout to the hidden chests in dense/urban areas, i had a blast hunting those down. but most of the game is tedium through bad dialogue, a paint-by-numbers story, lifeless characters, repetitive combat, and awful outdoor level design. it's probably the best JRPG made in the last decade, yet it still makes me yearn for the better days of this genre.

yes, i did play for 120 hours. it was lockdown of winter 2020/2021 and i let Tim Rogers persuade me to try this against my better instincts. i learned a valuable lesson: there's a difference between an entertaining review and an accurate assessment of quality or worth.

as typical roguelike fare, it fulfills the task of randomized dungeon diving. it's better than its predecessor, but its fundamental design doesn't feel good. i found it to be an exhausting and unsatisfying experience.

the biggest issue is in its animations and enemy design. its challenge relies heavily on lots of random projectiles because most enemies are lobbing fireballs, bones, and orbs at you - sometimes through walls and often from off-screen. there's no dodge, limited missile resistance, and a painfully short iframe window after taking damage; you'll often take damage and then get knocked into a second damage source, with no chance to recover. combined with the cramped level design, poor windup animations, and messy color-coding - it's hard to read and hard to react.

the numbers seem to be deflated to extract more hours of gameplay from the formula. there are hundreds of upgrades, all of which are minor 1-2% increases to health and damage. you'll pick up new equipment or runes, only to discover that it will take several more hours to unlock the capacity to use them. the grind might be more enjoyable if the randomized traits offered significant twists to the gameplay, but mostly these are moderate inconveniences

there's a saving grace in the new classes. the first hours can be fun because you'll be trying out new weapons and talents with each run. there's some intrigue to figuring out which runes are overpowered for each class. more often, though, you'll be stuck with a subpar build, working around some obnoxious gimmick. it's death by a thousand paper cuts.

Thoughtful introspection into psychotherapy and tech work - recommended for anyone that's spent time in this industry and struggles with the many ethical problems around tech culture and tech work. It strongly resonated with me personally because it spoke to many of my exact circumstances, but it's unlikely to have such an impact for everyone.

The writing and voice acting are good, but the story itself is not strong - exemplified by the rather sudden and pointless endings it has to offer. It asks a lot of questions but offers no advice or answers. It's surprisingly linear for a visual novel, where I would usually expect a little more variation given the number of dialogue choices to make throughout every conversation.

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY COME ON DOWN TO WALMART AND GET YOUR BARGAIN DIABLO YES THAT'S RIGHT IT'S WALMBART DIARBLOOOOO~

DECKARD CAIN? STAY A WHILE AND FUCK OFF, THANK YOU! NO ROOM FOR STORIES HERE! WHO NEEDS CHARACTERS OR WORLDBUILDING WHEN YOU'VE GOT ACID RESISTANCE GEAR TO COLLECT! YOUR WHOLE LIFE YOU'VE BEEN SPOILED BY LUSH CUTSCENES AND METICULOUSLY CRAFTED SOUND EFFECTS, NOW IT'S TIME TO GET YOUR BUTT INTO THIS OLD CLUNKER AND RELIVE THE EXPERIENCE OF GOING TO YOUR FRIEND'S HOUSE TO PLAY NINTENDO AND BEING FORCED TO USE THE BUNKHOLE WILDCATZ CONTROLLER!

WAS DIABLO THREE TOO POLISHED FOR YOU? DID YOU FIND YOURSELF UNNERVED BY THE CONSISTENTLY THOUGHTFUL AESTHETICS OF DIABLO TWO? THEN BUY YOURSELF A COPY OF WALPMART DIABLOW TODAY YOU CHEAP PIECE OF SHIT!

I had planned on skipping this because I played the first one already, and didn't feel the need for more Ori. This looked pretty much identical. I underestimated how much fine-tuning of the fundamentals here would improve the gameplay. This elevates a game that was loveable-but-janky into perhaps the best platforming experience ever crafted. It takes the handful of ideas that made the first game work and polishes them until they shine oh-so brilliantly.

Once you have all the tools of movement at your disposal, it feels incredible to zip through the terrain at lightning speed. The controls are tight and intuitive - I rarely struggled to execute any maneuvers. The pace of learning is just right - they give you just enough time to master your current tools before adding more complexity.

It's flexible and forgiving, too. You can smoothly cancel out of nearly any animation, which gives you this incredible dexterity with a low barrier to entry. Most challenges can be accomplished using a variety of methods, allowing you to develop your own style. An extremely generous checkpoint system encourages you to fail and experiment freely without making you feel coddled.

Combat still isn't great, but it's better than before and totally passable - especially early on where enemy design is simpler and more focused on encouraging dynamic movement. Attack animations, particle effects, and hitboxes are just too loose and hard to interpret to make the combat feel anywhere near as tight as the movement. I didn't care for the bosses, and the boss races make an unfortunate reprisal. There are also unclear rules around when you can bash through enemies, which leads to a some frustrating moments in late-game battles.

But most of my time with this game went towards exploring the map and time trials. I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to the time trials because they're so fucking good. The length is perfect - each course can be easily completed in under 40 seconds, which is just long enough to feel like a satisfying journey, but not so long that it's a struggle to keep the whole course in your head. Each one teaches you how to master a new mechanic, and by the end you'll have that skill fully incorporated into your toolkit. They're easy to learn and difficult to master, all of them are finely-tuned, dynamic, and a shitload of fun.

One of the best metroidvania platformers ever made. Easily recommended to most folks.

I had avoided buying this initially because I figured it was gonna be like Meatboy, where most of its sauce is spent on difficulty and punishing challenges. I picked this up after I heard someone describe this as "purely focused on movement", and I think that's accurate. It's a simple game with a lot of tiny flourishes. It's good - but not quite great.

The core gameplay loop of dodging, bobbing, and weaving is strong. The first few hours are challenging but not frustrating. You don't have to survive that long on any stage, and the timing/spacing on everything is more forgiving than you might expect - it feels just right. Each stage has its own gimmick to keep things fresh. If you don't like the gimmick, you can skip ahead and come back later. Whatever stage you spend time on, you'll be improving at the whole game since it's all about the same thing - movement and tracking. Awesome art direction and sound design keeps it pleasantly entertaining the whole way through.

What holds this back from greatness is the tuning and randomness. No stage is deterministic - which is totally fine for some stages, but quickly devolves into chaos on harder stages. It's a frustrating experience to go from one stage where you generally feel responsible for your successes and failures, to another where you're basically grinding it out until you get a nice pattern. The overall design of this game is so tight! I really wanted to dump more hours into this to set record times on every stage, but eventually decided the process would feel less like mastery and more like grinding.

There's also a missed opportunity with the abilities. They're all excellent twists on the gameplay, but most of them have significant drawbacks that make them difficult to rely on - they're slow, costly, and sometimes unpredictable. I was initially excited to unlock these and experiment, but usually found myself leaning on the basic dash since it's so reliable. And it's a good dash! I just wish I didn't have to choose between such an important movement mechanic and other more experimental options.

It's great fun and I recommend this to anyone who enjoys tight movement - you'll get 4-6 hours of proper fun. The ingredients are here for a timeless game that could eat up hundreds of hours of a perfectionist's playtime, but it needs some mechanical tuning to simplify the stages and give the player more control over their fate.

Incredible art direction; the pixel art is moody and detailed with clever animations - at the expense of visual clarity. In some places, it's hard to make out the characters from the environment. The dungeons are quite bland compared to the home/hub areas and occasional setpieces.

Mixed bag of sound design; the narrator is phenomenal and probably the most delightful aspect of the game, especially for the first few hours and you receive constant commentary and lore. The music is fitting. Ability and enemy sounds are bland, even grating at times.

Gameplay is the biggest weakness - which is unfortunate for a roguelike with heavy repetition. Dungeon layouts are simple and predictable. Lots of character classes, but their playstyles don't have much chance to shine against such boring enemies. You'll spend a lot of time kiting in circles. You can also just run straight past without much issue if you don't need to grind. It's leaning on the classic isometric action RPG formula but lacks the necessary tuning and polish.

Beautiful, frustrating, boring. Check it out for the art and narrative.