excellent art, tunes, dungeon crawling combat and base building

well impressed at how confidently it rolls credits on a 12ish hour experience, while learning you up on the many (many) mechanics in case you want to go Deep beyond them

cult management makes for pretty chuckle-worthy mechanics across the board. loved the character designs and the speed at which things move along

some quality of life quirks on base construction and proccing grated here and there but, really really fab time with this

played this through for the distinct locales and stylishly framed between-level-cutscenes

nails a couple of scenes relating to abusive relationships that could have easily whiffed entirely

ultimately, i'd much rather play stuff like this; that tries new stuff, even if it (imo) misses more than it lands

because gameplay is flat and fails to convince me that max payne / hotline miami (clear influences) works vs mainly melee enemies

a typical level (there are 50) consists of: enter room; slow down time; click enemy heads with pistols (rarely need to bother with anything else other than a few rifle shots) before it aggros/attacks; end level. something like this https://streamable.com/vjyhz5, with bosses also struggling to shake things up https://streamable.com/50g1lg

difficulty emerges in the form of placing enemies behind blind corners, where they'll chunk your health while you wrestle the janky reticle into working up close

i feel like there's a game half as long, taking itself half as seriously, that really gets at what made it's inspirations tick: each room is a puzzle, you have limited but meaningful tools - how will you solve this room?