Retrace the Light

Yet another Mixed review. I was so close to recommending this, but the final boss rush at the end of the game and the complete visual and mechanical fustercluck that it was destroyed all the love, patience and goodwill the game had built up to that point. 75% of the game is fantastic. The puzzles are clever, the combat is mostly satisfying and the ui is wonderful. But there's a ton of typos, a total lack of focus on player understanding in boss fights, no explanation of multiple boss mechanics and just too many instances of the game not giving the player the needed information before a puzzle that can kill you starts. Far too often critical information is offscreen, including but not limited to interactions, progression, hazards, and teleports, meaning that the game slowly devolves from a really slick puzzle focused ARPG to a trial and error head-bashing session. Made even more frustrating by the fact that the game has a wide-view interaction, it just forgets to use it to show the player what to expect half the time. This is all exemplified by the game's last four bosses. All style over substance. Ridiculous VFX that make it impossible to track your location, 100-0 damage combos, poor damage, low health and low trace conveyance in combat, and a core damage mechanic that is irrelevant in nearly every boss fight. Blink is an awesome idea, but it's just too bad it's not usable in every boss fight. The game is so damn close to being incredible, but it all just felt so rushed and undercooked at the end. Clean, well telegraphed puzzles go by the wayside for hair trigger instadeath puzzles, retrace is blocked in some states and those states show up in retrace puzzles. And combat just devolves into a visual mess of particles where you can't see yourself. I was able to sequence break several levels at the end due to having ranged attacks which was great except for tying to use those same ranged attacks in boss fight, really love having an attack where you have to build up the charge just not hit the boss cus the auto-targeting failed. If the game updates with accessibility setting that make it so you can actually see what's happening in fights, actually tutorializes boss mechanics, and about doubles the number of overview interactibles that are in the game, it'd be such an easy game to recommend. But it's just too messy in the last quarter of the game to say I had a good time. Love seeing Chinese games that question dictatorial leadership though, so that's cool.