This game is a disappointment beyond words, but I will try to use words to describe it. I was very excited to play this actually due to being interested after the initial reveal trailer and then seeing it win Games for Impact at TGA 2025. To boil down how I feel after having just reluctantly pushed through to finish this game: I do feel very impacted, but in predominantly negative ways. I was only impacted positively when I hit the credits so I could press the uninstall button.
The gameplay is extremely AAA. I mean this in every negative way possible. At the beginning of the game, you have a short chase sequence and have to jump across a gap in a river. Once you cross this gap, you're instantly greeted with a gap in a wall to squeeze through. Shortly after that, you are greeted with off-white bluish-yellow paint on boards that have to be climbed up. Your character eventually gets some powers - you have a grapple hook power, and you have a glide, AND you can wall run! It's unimaginative, uninventive, boilerplate gameplay.
The level design is repetitive and boring. Since this game takes place in what I assume is meant to be Louisiana, I guess that makes sense, as most of the levels take place in a swamp, but everything looks the same. It's hard to discern that you're in a new chapter when it looks as brown and gross as the last. The level design ONLY got interesting at the SECOND TO LAST CHAPTER when it was actually a new environment.
The soundtrack is LAUGHABLY AWFUL. It is so unironically terrible that I questioned if the lyrics were written by AI, yet all I could find when looking this up was people on Reddit talking about the soundtrack being incredible. Most of the songs with lyrics are LITERALLY DESCRIBING THE ENTIRE STORY YOU JUST WITNESSED EXACTLY AS YOU WITNESSED IT INSTEAD OF LETTING YOU CRITICALLY THINK FOR YOURSELF OR HAVING ANY KIND OF METAPHORS. Reading the comments on Reddit led me to realize that most of the people that are defending this game's atmosphere, story, and music are making these claims from either ignorance to TRULY well written media with well-placed soundtracks and good audio design, or they are intellectually underdeveloped, and I honestly mean that in the most respectful way possible but there's seldom a respectful way to talk negatively about someone else's intelligence.
HOWEVER - I was on the verge of uninstalling and refunding the game after finishing Chapter 3 but then I heard "Benjy's song" play while I was finishing the chapter and was laughing so hard at the ridiculous absurdity in HOW BAD that song is written and how insulting to my own intelligence that it felt like that I HAD to see the rest of the game through to see if it got worse. Seriously, listen to that song. They describe the entire story you JUST witnessed five seconds ago with zero metaphors or intelligent writing. If this wasn't AI then consider myself thoroughly impressed.
The writing more than once had me question if this game was made for children as there is zero nuance or implication in the writing. All of it is very literal and boiled down to be as non-complex as possible. But then you realize the game uses curse words like ♥♥♥♥ and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ a LOT, so it's very obviously meant for adults that can think for themselves, but the writers have zero motivation to actually ask you to use your brain and engage with the implications and instead spell everything out for you like a toddler. It's nerve-wracking.
The combat is also incredibly boilerplate. You have a skill tree, but it's more like a skill "branch". You have a couple of spells that take a really long time to recharge and otherwise you fight the same five mob types in the game (aside from boss fights) and there are so many combat encounters that it overstays its welcome. It wouldn't be nearly as bad to deal with if there were any other redeeming factors about the game. But the combat is so reminiscent of how much combat they throw at you in the God of War reboots while having it be very uninteresting and disengaging that you don't want to do it ever again after a couple encounters. I powered through and kept the combat on until about chapter 8 and then I was so bored that I turned on the "skip combat" option to finish the rest of the game. And you know it's bad when the devs decide they need to add an option like that to their game. I wonder if there are any internal statistics of how many people have skipped combat encounters, because I'd be surprised if it's not an extensively long list.
This game is Xbox Game Studios' attempt at combining mechanics and "in-your-face-no-room-for-interpretation" storytelling of AAA Sony games like the rebooted God of War, Spider-Man, and Little Big Planet to make something arguably less palatable than the Gollum game. Saying I am underwhelmed would be the understatement of the century.
EDIT: Forgot to mention but the music is also so bad that they thought ahead and DO include the option to literally REMOVE the lead vocals. If you make music so bad that you include an option to make it an instrumental, then why are you releasing the music?
