This was the worst game I have ever played and it's not even close. I even took the time to 100% just to be sure that my hatred was justified and it absolutely is. I will attempt to organize my thoughts from here on out in order to keep this from being a vitriolic rant but I've also never written a review before so apologies if it's weird.
MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
Art/Character Design:
I'll start with the only part I can say isn't bad. The sprites are cute, the attack animations show off the characters well, and the world is well-depicted with some interesting looking areas. The character designs were lovely, the kind I'd jump to draw if it weren't for the fact that this game fills me with an indescribable rage (but how does the TV smoke? Lol). However, some sprites aren't updated; like the nurse in the city ending which is rather jarring. If you're going to update the visuals update it all. It looks far stupider to have a few dud sprites than to have all of them be that way. In addition, some items like the elder bark or ballet shoes just have.... no sprite at all. Even some standard item sprite as a filler would look better than nothing, it makes the game look and feel unfinished.
Map Design:
Terrible. Awful. The worst. I've never hated a game's layout worse. One million dead ends, everything loops and there's no minimaps ANYWHERE to even ATTEMPT to alleviate any of these issues. I'm the kind of person who goes everywhere in a game, interacts with everything, and exhausts every possible dialogue option, so terrible layout after terrible, winding layout made me want to tear my hair out. It's hard to keep track of where I had and hadn't been, and I just had to guess at times which fork would lead me to a side area and which one would lead me to some cutscene that rendered the other option inaccessible. I HATE games like that. If you want to be open world, fine, I'll come back later. If you want to be a linear game, STOP adding a hundred side areas that I have to sneak through in some unknowable order. At LEAST add them all in the same area so that I know the option that leads off screen is meant to be the final one. In addition, the random encounter rate was HELLISH. In most areas, you can just run, rendering enemies a minor inconvenience or easy XP fodder. However, in some late-game areas like Vurrus's mansion the encounter rate is not turned down for more difficult enemies that have either very low or zero escape chance, which actively DISCOURAGES exploration, as spending a minute or two on a fight and wasting items every few tiles gets extremely grating; even more so when you're trying to run around and look for clues for a convoluted puzzle.
Puzzles:
Speaking of the puzzles, wow! I've never felt so simultaneously frustrated and bored at the same time. Some puzzles are so laughably easy there's hardly a point in there being one, whereas others feel like you need to be reading Karbonic's mind. Easy ones err on the side of fetch quests, just running around pointlessly for clues. Harder ones have you feeling like you're schizophrenic with some of your attempts. Some of them are also EXTREMELY repetitive. Wow I get to unlock ANOTHER door with a number code. Exciting, I guess. But some doors Alex can just punch through. Sure. Whatever. That being said, no matter how stupid the puzzle or solution, I was able to solve them all myself within a reasonable, if not occasionally frustratingly long, amount of time (with the exception of the stone button puzzle in Vurrus's mansion that I brute-forced using the sound cues because I was tired of running around looking for clues and encountering 849387 enemies I couldn't run from; so I can't speak on that).
Fighting:
Pretty standard turn-based combat with a few timed cues. And by a few I mean like.. exactly three moves (though I could be missing some, so don't quote me on that). While it is a little annoying to have to remember if you queued up a timed attack in .3 seconds before you need to enter the prompt, I can admit that that's a skill issue on my part. I don't have anything terrible to say about the combat, but I also don't have anything great to say. Each character fell into a very strict class, but nothing terribly original. The attacks, too, were all things I'd seen before in other games to some extent. Nothing felt new or fresh or particularly fun. I won't note this as a bad thing because not every game can be terribly innovative but this one really just had nothing. A big, mid conglomeration of things I've seen done better elsewhere to create a fighting experience that was just passable.
Difficulty:
Snooze. Don't come looking for difficulty (with one small exception I'll discuss later). I will say that I fought through nearly every random encounter, which means I could have been slightly overleveled, but the friend who gifted me the game RAN from nearly every random encounter and they echoed my sentiment of fights being a breeze. Even the bosses were hardly an issue. Overworld hazards were more of a threat than they were (speaking of.. were a thousand instakill hazards really necessary on the satellite?). For being a being akin almost to a god, Vurrus sure did come across as being able to be blown over by a light breeze. Even the crab robot was harder than they were. I understand that there was more powerful bosses to come but.... did the dev realize that there can be multiple difficult bosses? Especially when heal-bots and saves are handed out like candy and ESPECIALLY considering what this game thinks counts as "difficult". Also.. some of the bosses had health bars when none of the other enemies did. Entirely unnecessary with how easy they were, no one is going to be chipping at the bosses long enough to need the motivation of a health bar and it just makes the game feel messy and amateur. There was also some system of resistances and weaknesses which could very well be fantastic but I never paid attention to it because the differences in damage, in addition to the low enemy health to begin with, rendered it entirely unimportant.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
Gameplay:
Yawn dot com and that kind of sums it up. A lot of walking in some sections (seriously, what was the point of getting the car stolen? If everything got sucked out of the Garden it could end up where it needed to and get destroyed anyways, and the player never saw any real repercussions from Jack for losing their car. All it served to do was make walking around the map slow and annoying on the last day), but GENERALLY not awful on that front. A lot of fighting. Dialogue. Nothing that made me feel particularly immersed or excited to keep playing. In fact, a lot of it made me feel very annoyed or frustrated. I would have been far more willing to push past that if there was literally anything to look forward to other than being done. Also, while this could be considered a personal grievance, I hated the timed sections. The one in the Water Treatment Plant was so lenient as to be irrelevant (but also.. random encounters during a timed section? Seriously??) However, the one in the subway maze was way too tight, ESPECIALLY considering you need to look at the map of the area AFTER THE TIMER STARTS. Considering all that, it's additionally frustrating that it takes you to the game over screen instead of respawning you back at the beginning (with the premise that Isaac dragged you out or the like, seeing as he doesn't need to breathe). I understand that that's a bit of a nitpick, but I'm trying to demonstrate that thing after thing like this add up to create a wholly unenjoyable gameplay experience.
Writing:
Just saddens me more than anything. There's a lot of potential here, but it's ALL squandered. So many interesting premises that are built up, ones that intrigued me, just to either never be addressed again or concluded in an anti-climactic way. World-building is minimal and unsatisfactory. (Out of characters, cont. in replies)
