I almost gave up on this game partway through but have now just completed it with 118% (i.e. beating all the content in base game + 1.1 update) plus all the steam achievements. Needless to say, I do very much enjoy this game, but I also have a lot of criticisms despite it. So let's get into my thoughts.
First, the positives. The most obvious strength of the game is its stellar presentation. The color design, music, and sound effects are all top notch, and it goes without saying the sprite line art is lively and adorable. Plus the game just has ***fantastic*** ambience, especially in a lot of the secret areas which really adds to the mystique and charm. The ambience is complemented by the open world design that rewards you for thinking about how it fits together with room for crazy skips and lots of lore to ponder. Next, I do genuinely adore the movement in this game. Inputs are snappy and responsive, the sound and sprite design makes it feel damn good to move around, and there is a lot of tech to learn and master. This means that the gameplay has the potential to be great, which it often is. But, this leads me to my main gripe with the game, which is its puzzle design.
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I played the game with minimal help up until halfway through Eroded Beach, which seems to be the major difficulty spike that most get stuck on. I found the puzzles from this point to be too arcane to understand and so I relied on watching walkthroughs to demonstrate how to solve most screens from this point on. My criticisms of the puzzle design in this game boil down to two main points. First, although I love the amount of movement tech this game has it does a bad job of teaching tech required to beat certain challenges. I can definitely think of the last puzzle for [spoiler]Basin 21, which requires you to know that sliding momentum is largely maintained while you are charging,[/spoiler] which is something I don't remember the game teaching me. There are tons of such advanced mechanics that are helpful/necessary for any playthrough but just aren't really taught to the player, so you may struggle for hours bashing your head against a challenge unaware that you just don't know some obscure mechanic necessary to beat it. Near the start of the game there's a room that drops a hint on you if you're stuck in it for long enough, and I think more such hints throughout the game would have been nice.
My second criticism is that a lot of the puzzles are too open ended which makes them feel overwhelming. You take a glance at them and it looks like a bunch of random ♥♥♥♥ just thrown everywhere and it's not apparent where to start and you are unsure if you are making progress. I understand a lot of the levels are supposed to have more open-ended and freeform solutions but I think making what the 'intended' route is a little more readable would have gone a long way.
Finally, to put it together, the combination of difficult, confusing puzzles / extremely precise input timing required for many challenges is in my mind a poor pairing. Every time you fail at one of these it is unclear if the culprit is you having the wrong strategy or just being a few frames off on one of your inputs. To make this worse many of the most unintuitive and precise sequences in the game do not have checkpoints at reasonable intervals beforehand, meaning that you may have no idea how to solve a challenge while also getting brutally punished for any experimentation or any slight execution errors by having to redo a tough section before you get another crack. This is why my least favorite puzzles in the whole game are the ones based around you needing to acquire a ton of momentum and then use it to clear a big jump/gap/break a durable wall as their design feels overwhelming, they can require ridiculously strict timing and input memorization, and for common failure points like crashing into damage zones or not having quite enough speed to make it at the end you can't really know if the mistake is coming from a slight execution error or a faulty strategy.
Which really sucks because this game is so, so rewarding for those that manage to push through and truly understand how all the mechanics work. On my playthrough where I beat the game in under an hour for the Pinnacle achievement, I was shocked at how I could zip through areas that had me at a loss the first time I went through because once you know all the tech and all the solutions you can just enter into a flow state and have a blast. I just think the game could do a much better job of actually teaching its players how to master it themselves, rather than relying on outside help in the form of walkthroughs to make it fun.
A few minor complaints to wrap things up:
1. Controller support is lacking. It really feels like this game was designed to play on keyboard, because trying to play on controller makes the tougher challenges genuinely seem impossible to me. I think more thought could have been given to alternate controller configurations that would be more intuitive, because certain actions like sliding are pretty annoying to do on them..
2. World design could have been improved in places. My biggest complaint is [spoiler]the invisible wall/ceiling above Mola Town that will prevent you from falling down from Eroded Beach/similar spots and bouncing up to Jalta dregs, skipping the pro section.[/spoiler] I strongly dislike this because it is the only immersion breaking barrier put down to prevent sequence breaks, the game is fine with huge skips otherwise but in this case it isn't OK? And this barrier is also redundant because [spoiler]you can trivially bounce past the pro section straight to the dregs provided you start from higher up (Astral Tower/Bridge/Satellite container)[/spoiler] so I just don't think it should be there.
3. More content should have been added to some secret areas, [spoiler]particularly Third Cistern and the Transit III area (the latter just consists of a 3rd wall break)[/spoiler]. I can understand not wanting to put cool content behind areas most players will miss but idk it felt like a disappointment to come across these especially after all the effort put getting there. [spoiler]Plateau underside[/spoiler] also has basically nothing which is sad given how cool its ambience is but it makes sense given that there's plenty of lore in [spoiler]False Field[/spoiler] which comes just before.
4. I wonder if the [spoiler]tech where you gain height when toggling the rollerblades[/spoiler] is too broken. There are so many challenges that can be trivialized by just chaining jumps with that item for unlimited height, not to mention you can skip entire literal entire areas like [spoiler]Precipice Bridge[/spoiler] using them. One one hand they can be a good 'easy mode' for struggling players that may be alerted to their existence via a walkthrough, giving them a way to bypass a lot of the tougher challenges. However, humans naturally gravitate for the path of least resistance and it creates a perverse incentive where even players skilled enough to beat the game the right way will use the blades to skip whatever they can. I felt that the [spoiler]power bat[/spoiler] was a more effectively implemented version of this, as it gives more lenience to the incredibly fast and precise timings required (especially towards the end of the more difficult areas) without actually opening up any new options or sequence breaks for the player. But, this item is found far too late in the game, will be very hard to find for many players, and requires the completion of a difficult and confusing puzzle beforehand, so I worry a lot of the players that may benefit from this item will not find it.
I know this review has a lot of criticisms but again I only care this much because I love this game. It's one of my favorite indie platformers and I'd put it up there with some greats. I'd still recommend it with the caveat that using a walkthrough may improve your experience.
