Unfortunately not a game for me. I can see the craft and the ideas behind it, I just cannot enjoy it. Still, it is most likely a good game, for reasons that may become clear by the end of this meandering review.
It is a game with a message, first thing it does is hit you in the face with it, then does it again and again. It is a message I didn't need to hear. I agree with this message, I [b]resonate[/b] with it. The game was preaching to the choir. To be fair, the few instances of dialogue, or longer monologues, where an idea is explored for longer than two sentences are pretty good, I really liked them, it is a shame that [i]most[/i] of the time the writing you find is mostly composed of short "barks" that might as well have been my own thoughts, echoed back to me.
For full disclosure: One thing that made it a worse experience than it should be was the way the camera rubberbands up or down for a fraction of a second under very specific circumstances. It is probably unnoticeable for most people and, in fact, I did not notice it until I realized it was causing the most severe episode of motion sickness I've had in years. At one point during the last stretch where the wall textures cause a moiree effect that was making my stomach do backflips, I fell down into a room and had to close my eyes to avoid the parallax effect of the background, because if I didn't I would puke.
There's a lot of quirks that I found annoying. The character movement is floaty in a way that makes it hard to be precise, but windup/down animations leave you rigidly stuck in place for longer than comfortable. When you are hit you are pushed backwards, instead of away from the enemy, so if you are within an enemy's insanely wide hitbox and turn around to move away, you will be hit and pushed deeper into its hitbox. This made more than one boss hideous to beat.
There's also the way the game feels like playing NG+ on your cousin's save in a borrowed GBA metroidvania cartridge. Your character can do so many things from the very start, and your moves are accompanied by so many visual effects, it's hard to know what is going on until you get used to it all. It's disorienting in many ways. This isn't helped by some mechanics being (probably intentionally if I go by the author's own writings on game design) obscured. What is Rank? What is a Defense Break? What is the combo meter for? Is the combo meter the multiplier next to your score or is it the glowing pips you use to launch "charge attacks" and heal? (In-game text refers to each with the same name in at least one occasion).
So, it had several confusing layers. Some of that I may have missed an explanation for (I think I read everything every NPC had to say, but I may have skipped some message unintentionally), some of that may be intentional obscurity, and some of that may be genuine mistakes (or misunderstandings on my part). None of them was a positive addition to my experience with it.
[b]And yet[/b], I played it to the end. I played the demo for about an hour, thought of that cutesy GBA metroidvania NG+ comparison, left the demo aside because I didn't quite like it, and bought it a few days later anyways because I kept thinking about it. I played for 3 hours as I felt increasingly queasy and then powered through a motion sickness that would have made me drop games I enjoy, just to play 90 minutes more and complete the last section (I could not find all the hidden fruits under these conditions, though. But I tried, for some reason!); reached the final boss and hit my head against it until I found out it had a second phase and decided to drop the game entirely, because at this point I didn't understand how the game expected me to play anymore.
The next day I woke up, still feeling sick enough that I had to stay in bed all morning, and thought "you know what? I [i]want to know how it ends[/i]".
So I looked for a video playthrough on youtube. And didn't find one.
And then I had no recourse other than getting back into it. I hit my head against the final boss a few more times, and somewhere along the line I realized I was learning something for the first time in the whole game, and started playing the game instead of stubbornly expecting the game to bend to my will. And I finished it. And to be fair, the ending is pretty neat.
I still didn't really like playing it, it still isn't a game for me (even if I actually enjoyed it, my body certainly wouldn't take it), but for a moment at the end we had a conversation, and I think I understood something about it.
