This was the most beautiful, touching, philosophically complicated, and oh, I got to tell you, it was perfect. Perfect. Down to the last minute details game I have ever played.

One might look at the title, play it and think it's so simple to grasp what this game symbolizes, yet cunning linguists along with appreciators of ancient philosophy know such trivialities lead to nowhere.
The word desert here does not mean a place with sand which is coarse, rough, irritating, and it gets everywhere, but "desert" as in abandon.

Now, abandoning the game is easy enough, but something must be judged by its in-universe rules and not be influenced by external factors which inevitably lead to a warped view.
You cannot abandon the game from within the game. You gotta play. You can't even pause the game. You honk the horn instead. And what is the result of that resilience to pull through?

8 hours for just one point. Seems like a bad deal, yet such is the nature of a gamer.
We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

When you turn the number 8 on the side, it becomes infinity. An ingenious move which shows the game technically has no end, yet not apparent to a player, who plays it for the first time thinking they'll get a natural conclusion out of it instead.

Truly one of the games of all time, yet I still feel there is much left to grasp, so I'll humbly give it a 0,5/5. Not from the game itself, but from how much there is still left to discover, making what I wrote not giving it the justice it deserves.

the music is great as always but the game in every other respect feels like a departure from what i loved about previous gear games, it all feels too clean, simple, and slow for me to continue feeling anything special for it. i really did hope the game would eventually reach the level of XX or Xrd through updates but around the time of jack-o i realized that this was likely never going to happen.
i can be grateful at least for it introducing people to the previous entries, though i still feel disconnected from everyone that sticks to it since it hardly feels like the same series to me anymore.

edit: dropped by another star with the recent build up for a new character drop making me realize this is the first time ive actively wished for a game to not include a character i like