REPLACED

An amazing debut of an emerging studio, a beautiful game and great spritual successor to Flashback (1992). Filled with platforming interleaved with combats, with a substantial amount of dialogues, but not too much. The visuals are gorgeous, and not just because of slapping on 2.5D pixel-art style. Environments are detailed and believable, there's a lot of thought and attention to detail put into the scenery. This makes most of the pixels on your screen meaningful. The audio part is well done, with very fitting soundtrack. It's a bit sad that there's no voice acting, but it's old-school, baby! Some say that combat is repetitive and I know where it's coming from, but it never bored me. It's buttery smooth and very cinematic. Each chapter adds one more gimmick to it, making it smoother, tighter with enemies and even more action-packed with occassional ability to just mow down the baddies. Still, the game doesn't power creep you that much and you have to watch your moves till the end. I really enjoyed the combat system - I'd say it's quite refreshing to the genre. The platforming is good and doesn't contain any noticable BS (looking at patch notes, this is recent improvement), except for that one part with tight timing, but it's doable even without inhuman reflexes, just a bit of trial and error. Plot-wise the game is good too, does its work, is intentionally confusing at first but then it gets easier to grasp over time. I really like that the game has something to say, even if it's relatively basic stuff. The world is extended with collectible notes, that should be optional for the understanding of main plot - they just add extra flavor. One thing that I didn't liked is that the game forces your progress at some point, not allowing you to backtrack for missed stuff and doesn't communicate well which way to go is the correct way - even when I tried to explore everything first, I managed to cross some points of no return by accident. This is mitigated by chapter/checkpoint select so that you can revise the part and collect the missed stuff and then go back to the latest one. Also, while collecting the soundtrack to play on your walkman-like is neat and fitting, it was a bit awkward to play it with limitation of just standing there and looking at plain UI of the music player. I'd love to play a spinoff or a sequel, or anything that Sad Cat will do in the future. Go and play it, it's worth the price.