For what’s ostensibly a mashup between two different inspirations — the Siren series and Junji Ito’s The Hanging Balloons — it’s neat to see just how well the two blend together. Your goal is to find an old family heirloom in an abandoned village, pursued by beings known as ‘The Ascended’: the former denizens who have since become hot-air-balloon-like creatures, capable of flying high above the ground, with the aim of swooping in and killing you on sight. Your only recourse against them is to use your family’s ancestral ability to enter the senses of those around you, seeing what the Ascended see, figuring out where they are, and using that to escape their notice as you delve deeper and deeper into the village. I love how varied the level design is: you never do the same thing twice. You can go from having to sneak across a large swathe of the town, to having to solve a puzzle to get rid of the enemies guarding where you need to go, to then having to open and close doors to bait and trap enemies and clear a path through. Even when the game goes back to ‘sneak through this gauntlet’ there’s generally some twist to keep it fresh: maybe you have to climb up rather than go across, maybe you have to sneak through a maze, maybe you have something that can help you navigate through all the enemies. The game consistently keeps itself fresh, and even if some sections are more memorable than others it never wears out its welcome, doing a very effective job at building up right until the end.

I… do wish the sensejacking mechanics were a bit more viable? A lot of the time when I tried to use it I found myself trying to figure out which enemy I was even in the head of — and, conversely, which specific enemy was the one I needed to sensejack — and while there are sometimes context clues to help figure it out, the environmental design is maybe a bit too samey for you to immediately tell if you’re in the head of the enemy you’re looking for, compounded by how long scrolling through the list can generally take. Maaaaaaaakes some areas a bit rough to go through, and a lot of the time made just trying to improvise and stealth more viable than using sensejacking to plan ahead. Aside from that, though, this was super cool: I love the core mechanic and how the game toys with it the further and further you go through, and I’m also a fan of a lot of the little visual design quirks — how your sensejacking is represented, how you can see the gunk inside the necks of the Ascended — and even if maybe I wish the core mechanic was a little less disorientating it still does a lot of cool (and creepy) shit with it. Definitely recommend this, and I’m really hoping to see more cool stuff from this dev in the future.