What dreadful melancholy. It's rare I play a game that makes me feel this morose. Maybe not since Silent Hill 2 has a game just made me feel like stomped shit. What begins as "Can I escape this planet?" slowly, and even agonizingly, becomes "Can I escape myself?" I don't want to get into spoilers, but this is simply not what it seems on the surface and is one of the most thematically rending games I've ever played. There's a method to this looping madness.

To gameplay itself: just excellent. I was worried about playing this on PS5 with a controller rather than PC where my skills are much better with a keyboard and mouse, but Housemarque perfectly tuned the style to controller. The dualsense feels perfect, the use of the adaptive trigger to switch to alt-fire is just brilliant really and the best I've seen any developer use the tech. Sometimes you get absolutely stomped, pelted by a million bullets. But other times you rip and tear these levels to pieces with your sword and weaponry. It feels intensely satisfying to stomp those early levels that gave you trouble.

I don't really have criticisms outside the clear positive feedback loop that comes from most roguelites. It's hard to knock the endless loop as "playing the same thing over and over" because of how in-tune this is thematically with the game. What a breath of fresh air, what a pleasant surprise, what a god damn nightmare.