It was okay - just made me want to go and play Hades some more.

There are only 2 dungeons and the game hints at things that are more impressive than what is actually in the game (a character just disappears and you never to get to date him even though he says he is an axe? that sounds sick what the hell).

The combat and RPG elements are quite simple but inoffensive. The dating sim elements feel quite non-existent (the dating events are nowhere near as good as something like Persona) and everyone is way to eager to get into your hands.

Non-binary representation tho :)

Frustrating in so many ways. Camera angles make its hard to gauge how far away objects are, picking things up can be temperamental and your friend just disappears sometimes, forcing me to reset from checkpoint.

There was one puzzle where you have to move a trolley and then crawl through a vent to do a precision jump on the trolley, and if you miss, you die and restart from checkpoint - except the checkpoint is from before you moved the trolley so you have to repeat this over and over, fighting with tedium and the camera angle.

The animations for chasing enemies are appalling and you will often teleport into their hands.

Stadia was a pretty good experience (this is my first game I've finished on the service, and I played this on my free trial so I am very happy I didn't spend £25 on this game), however it is an odd choice to have such a darkly-lit game on the service, since the compression crushes the blacks and causes lots of visual artifacts. The input delay was very low and I don't think I failed any platforming due to it.

Our sense of space and distance is simply incomplete when we are young. Our relationship to an urban environment is warped by our daily routine - three arcing lines leading from my front door to my school, the shop where I would buy sweets, and my cousin’s house, all held together (meta)physically by concrete buildings and dirt paths. One day, when I was 12, instead of following one of these three paths out of my house, I turned around and crossed a road that went in the opposite direction. I had unlocked an entirely new section of my town that I had never seen before and I could barely keep a hold of where I was, constantly reminding myself, ‘I took a left at the big tree and then crossed the road’ to try and remember my way back. And then suddenly, I find myself somewhere familiar, crossing between two houses that I had walked past on my way to school every morning for the last 900 days without thinking anything about.

When I eventually discovered the joys of google maps and running outside to see if the satellite would see me (despite the fact that there were a different set of cars parked outside of my house), I still didn’t fully understand where I was existing. My house pointed North, so even my pre-existing understanding of my daily arcing paths were longitudinally aligned with what I was being presented on the screen in front me.

The terraced houses in my street each had a garage, not attached to the homes themselves, but were instead nested into the bottom of culd-a-sacs. For as long as I had lived there, footholds had been carved into the brick work. On the flat tar roofs lay discarded glass bottles, sweet wrappers and bored teenagers. A 12 inch gap in 2 roofs perpendicular to each other at one end was enough to make 12 year old me feel like a parkour fiend. 3 years earlier I had made a similar leap between two wooden benches, only a foot and a half from the ground which resulted in me eating shit and snapping my front tooth in half.

When my dad moved out when I was 6 my bedroom in his terraced house consisted of a mattress on the floor and an Xbox on a upside milk crate. This new house faced onto a British A road, with a single tree in our shared backyard, a far cry from the pseudo-urban new town that I had grown up in. But inside the Xbox upstairs was a disk containing Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT 2002, which came with the console, gifted to me for my 5th birthday. To 5 year old me, the former must have been almost entirely alien to me, the pop art pallete wrapping around a dense and intertwining metropolis, but now 17 years later, I am reminded of those 12 inch jumps I made between garage rooftops and finding my way back home via one familiar footpath.