vivid/stasis

I feel that, at its core, vivid/stasis is a beautiful game with a lot of soul and passion put into it. I feel like vivid/stasis has one of the best stories across the indie scene, as it really and deeply left an impact on me and made me fairly emotional to progress through it with the main characters, I heavily recommend playing this game just for the story alone, it is that good. Though, at the end of the day, this is a review for a video game and not a book, which is where I feel that vivid/stasis fundamentally fails at being an enjoyable playing experience. I am not saying that vivid/stasis is a bad video game, I think that the greater majority of the game is great to play and go through, but those parts where the quality drops is very much noticeable and sours my experience with the game a tad, not enough to make me not recommend it, but enough where I feel it needs to be addressed. For starters, the songs. Vivid/stasis, a good majority of the time, has no issues with its songs, but there are times where either the music did not sound pleasant at all to listen to, the charting and the difficulty felt unfair and bloated just to make songs harder, or shoved in mechanics that were not well thought out / intense photosensitive scenes that made even me struggle with paying attention, as a person not affected by photosensitivity. I do not, by any means, consider myself to be the best at rhythm games, but there were points where my hands and fingers would start to get sore from how inconsistent the difficulty is at times. Another thing I will mention is the puzzles, which I well believe to be the biggest reason as to why I would hesitate to recommend this game to others. Every single one in the game (and there are a lot), are impossibly difficult, cryptic, needlessly convoluted, and require you to either be a master as a niche subject to understand what you are looking at, or require you to outside websites and sources to progress at all, something I feel like this game did not need to do. It got to a point for me where, after spending over an hour on a single puzzle in the early game, decided it would be better for my interest in the game and my time to simply look up the answers online. I also critique how big the game is. Unlocking everything (which thankfully is not needed for 100%) would take hundreds of hours, combined with a flurry of extra modes and secrets that feel unnecessary for a rhythm game, even if I found its story to be amazing. Overall, I believe vivid/stasis is a wonderful game that deserves the praise it gets, but I wish this game went through more effort to understand that it is a rhythm game at the end of the day and needs more engaging gameplay than story.