An overlooked gem of the Retro-Metroidvania craze. The presentation of the game is just sublime, offering a unique and highly stylish ride through crazy 16-bit vistas with an amazing synthwave soundtrack. The attention to detail is often staggering and rarely matched by other games. While the gameplay is nothing outstanding or snappy, it is fun from beginning to end and avoids overly hard difficulty spikes like many other games in the genre. This is mostly a relaxed, sometimes slightly challenging 5-7 hours escapism with a pretty decent story attached to it. There isn’t much replay value or innovation to be found but still highly recommended.

I enjoyed myself. Animations were phenomenal, it had a great soundtrack, and the gameplay was fairly tight. Story was quite emotional, and it drew me in enough to ask questions (one of which I definitely got right ;P).

It had a very 80s pastiche feel to it, and I appreciate that. I think there were some criticisms about that aesthetic, with it not being realistic, but it doesn't have to be.

I don't remember too many glitches, but the floppy board was bugged at one point, and I was able to use it outside of its intended purpose, which was actually kinda cool.

I don't know why, but I thought this was a Metroidvania? It sort of has some of that, with some ability-gated progression and collecting upgrades along the way, but there is zero backtracking (which is annoying, considering I wanted to try finding the First Memory disks) and no map (which some other reviewers said was a detriment, which is fair enough), but the fact it's not one is fine. That was an L on my part lol.

I definitely didn't expect what happened at the end. If you know, you know.