Extricate

Rating this game in the hopes it gets verified for profile features, since it definitely deserves it. Extricate is an iconic game in the achievement-hunting crowd, and after getting most of the gold times and a handful of diamond times, I can see why. This is an individual-level speedgame distilled to its barest elements, with a pure focus on movement and avoidance. As someone who has zero experience with bunny hopping and Source movement, the game's open-ended level design kept me from feeling overwhelmed by the learning curve of the gameplay. I won't lie — the mechanics feel unnatural at first. From what I've heard, this holds true for people with and without Source experience. Gaining speed feels rigid and unintuitive for the first few hours, but eventually, something clicks in your mind and it becomes hard not to fly through levels like a grasshopper on crack. I appreciate that the game never holds your hand or mandates high speeds, allowing you to learn at your own pace. The game has issues beyond the learning curve, though. The soundtrack, while catchy, gets repetitive quickly. The levels are frustratingly cramped sometimes, forcing you to flick your mouse to maintain speed (likely destroying your wrist in the process). And... the fans. These entities shatter the momentum of so many stages and only become more common further into the game. The game has bounce-pads; why include a slower, less consistent method of gaining height? Overall, despite my problems, Extricate's a real diamond in the rough if you give it a chance. Can't wait to see how many of my brain vessels burst during the hundo grind :)

Very fun game, worth 10/10

good video game

*edited* quick score 3*/5. Decreased because of poor implementation of how deaths are kept track of in speedrunning mode. Super janky feeling for sure but a good bhopping game nonetheless, the cycles really breathe life into the game and makes it feel like its own style of bhop. Level design is good, feels interesting as a slow clear, but then once you start going for diamonds you realize there are some meticulously placed obstacles to guide the route of the player, really impressive actually. Each level feels like its own new thing no obstacle ever really starts to feel repetitive. The game increases the freedom of some movements for an easier for beginner airstrafe. It's similar to typical bhopping but your "arc" doesn't matter, and not syncing properly wont slow you down. Some downsides to this is that you can't use a or d to stop yourself as easily, and S is more of a momentum stop instead of a hard stop, tricky to get used to but overall the game is quite fluid. Lots of bugs in the game, dev seems to have moved on from this project, mostly visual and technical however. A known bug is times being submitted as much shorter than the actual runs, for instance I got a 2 second time on a 8 second diamond but is it doesn't register these as diamonds so you don't feel cheated out of an experience. I was also having problems with diamonds registering but a reset fixed these, the menu would sometimes appear blank but again a reset always fixed and neither of these happened often.

surprisingly good

awesome game