A meticulously-designed, incredibly skilled action platformer that incorporates all its immersive sim elements with strong trade-offs for skill points and makes all of its fights hectic quick decision-making. From Sector 1 to the very end, the encounters give you a plethora of options to deal with enemies with the many guns, while also incorporating different builds and strategies, each of which always require a good amount of positioning, spacing, and finesse to pull off. You even have a morality system for different endings that affect your playstyle, whether that be speccing in strength and attack and guns for full damage berserk mode, or working in defensive roles and upping hacking and health so that you can run and stun by with as minimal losses as possible. Granted, the solutions early on are incredibly simple, and on replay I honestly think the first few levels kinda suck, and the level design is well... there I guess, but it's excellently put together despite these issues.

I personally finished the game on True Pacifist and True Berserk on Extreme, and both playstyles while short were very solid. The boss fights especially are well put together, with good attack patterns that force proper spacing and fast thinking to come out without any damage done. A couple of them are rudimentary in terms of dodge plan, but they're all very enjoyable overall.

The story isn't anything to scoff at either, incorporating a pretty neat if very edgy aesthetic to showcase the cycles of violence that we commit. You have alien races who are here to wipe out another, who wipes out the human race just to survive. Nobody is morally right in their conquest, only the extent of it is called into question.

Granted, it's very black/white, and very formulaic. Being the best most innocent person where you do no violence and exploit the most particular route and taking no violence in general is enough to convince everyone but the most extreme exceptions that the fight is over, and ending the violence starts today. The subtlety is thrown out the window in favor of throwing as many text logs that make it painfully clear that nobody really has a choice.... except you. Iji lacks the amount of character to really make your supreme completely vindicated agency worth it, and while it is metaphorical of the crimes we commit, and it does force you to really WORK to have the best ending, it feels shallow at the end. There isn't much of a moral argument to be had, when the high grounds are already created strongly for you. You are never FORCED to have to kill to survive, there's never a time where the lines grey, it's do the right thing or be a worse person for it.

There's just no CONTRAST. The thing about works that portray the endless violence, it's contrasted with what makes us human, why we vouch for our pacifist nature, there's supposed to be humanity, emotion, something that makes that intrinsic feeling. Like sure, Iji is absolutely arguing that there's a baseline you have to be to overcome violence, that you have to make for yourself. It's just hollow, it FEELS hollow, it's emotionally bereft. And because of that, at the end of the game, even when you do the right thing, I don't leave with my heart beating to my chest or whatever. It feels like a somewhat teenage and angsty validation of what's right. And honestly, that's fine for this game, especially from 2008, on a completely free price-tag.

It's still great and well well well well worth your time, and I haven't even spoken witty prose about how fucking amazing the soundtrack is, like just a constant string of bangers here. Art's pretty cool too.