I respect this game as an indie low-budget demo but in its current state its honestly very much a mess.

I liked the aesthetic and the hints at something greater, the artstyle suited the aesthetic. I liked the fact that the game clearly implied something greater going on and the sound design and soundtrack were all pretty decent.

But all of that is the skin of a game that due to its incredibly short running time tries to juggle so many good ideas but never develops any of them beyond rushing a bunch of mechanics. The platforming was pretty good but it went down in quality after they just kept introducing elements one after the other before anything significant happened. By the end of the game all of the platforming just involved grappling onto a lamp and then pressing all of your abilities to cross the gap, it would've been much better if they'd make the abilities more complex and introduced them as the game went along. If this is a demo for a larger game then maybe double the length of the demo but then save certain abilities for the whole game, we don't need like 7 keybinds this quickly, most of the platforming could've just been shortened in favour of more storytelling and more interesting combat.

Then we get to the combat which is easily the weakest part of the game to the point where I would say it was honestly quite bad. Every encounter was just one circle surrounded by four elevated circles whilst the same robots drop down, shoot at you and you kill them with ease, rinse and repeat for like 3 minutes and then you're done. The enemies were easy to beat but it would get annoying when you would land where you killed the last enemy and one of them would land right behind you. It wasn't difficult it was just annoying and kinda lazy.

And before somebody says I'm being too harsh to this game because it's an indie game that is trying to show off a concept the exact same thing can be said about 'Tag: The Power of Paint' which was an even shorter indie tech demo and yet that game had interesting variety in its levels and introduced each paint colour in an interesting and smooth way, it was a game that I enjoyed a lot and was sad to see it be so short since there was clear talent and very intelligent game design behind it.

Works as a concept for more developed game but is too much of a mess to be very good, I respect the developers and I hope they improve but I appreciate this game for than like it or think its of quality.

For such a long time I would've considered this game a masterpiece, a true gold-standard for the artform of game design. At this point I consider it the blueprint for a perfect game that unfortunately has too many flaws for me to really even call it great. Don't get me wrong I still love this game and there's no doubt in my mind that it's good, very good but the amount of praise it recieves despite its shortcomings and the community's refusal to acknowledge that this game could be so much more is both frustrating and pathetic as desperate fans try to lick the boots of Mojang who have been delivering on a sub-par level.

1. Optimization: This game is a pain in the ass to run, don't even bother playing it without Optifine or better yet like a dozen mods on Fabric just to get the thing to run at a steady pace. Constant stuttering all around, hate to break this to you put if you need to be a fat slob in their RGB room bearing a NASA computer to run this game smoothly you need to fix your shit.

2. Vapid updates: Mob votes are a violation of the Geneva Convention. The audacity of developers to basically just decide not to add 3 mobs to the game per update it fucking baffling, half of the mobs aren't even complex and when they are added it is so underwhelming. Camels are boring, frogs look funny but are also really boring. Refusing to add fireflies because frogs can't eat them IRL is actual brainrot, the frogs don't have to eat them, and so what if they do? The goal of this game is to go to kill a dragon, but noooooo the IRL frogs might die if we make fake frogs eat fake fireflies. Actually, the wild update just sucked in general, it was 75% shit left over from the Caves and Cliffs update and the last quarter was nice swamps and that's about it, genuinely bullshit that they promised so much for the birch forest only not to do it, lazy.

3. Not survival mode: It's hardly about surviving at this point, you just get a bed and make one (1) trip to a cave to get iron and now you're set forever, you win, you don't have to take a risk ever again. Your enemies include incredibly slow and useless zombies, skeletons that can be defeated with a shield, creepers that can be defeated with a shield, spiders that are too slow to catch you and literally nothing else. Why can't a horde of zombies break down your door? Why can't skeletons shoot your windows through to let spiders crawl in? Why can't spiders trap you in webs or jump onto you? Why aren't there creepers for every environment meaning they can always camoflague? Because that's too hard, they want to sell this game to children. Newsflash, the kids can just play on easy mode, the people who just want to build can play on easy mode. There are people who try to deflect this point by saying 2 things:
The first is that they just want to build in peace, if so play on easy mode (which would hypothetically remove these abilities), peaceful mode or even creative mode. If you just want a nice survival world for building then play on easy mode and add difficult enemies to normal/hard mode (because hard mode is still really damn easy)
The second is that this would take away from the creativity but no it wouldn't, you can be creative and intuative at the same time, in fact they both very often go together, you can be very creative if you have a problem to solve, it's even more creative than building a nice house that you probably nabbed from a tutorial.

4. Missing features: Why can't we build ships? Why can't this castle I built be raided? Why aren't villages even more complex? Why aren't illagers and piglins their own civilizations of sorts? Why aren't there more bosses? Why is the Wither pointless? Why can't we shield bash? Why are the bosses that do exist really boring? Why aren't there gravestones? Why aren't there backpacks? Why isn't there more wildlife? Why isn't there a map with waypoints? Why aren't there more dimensions? Why aren't there more biomes? Why no thirst or temperature? Why doesn't this game just game the quark mod by default? I could go on for ages, whenever I play this game with mods I just think to myself "half of these features should be in the game anyways" but nope, they're not.

5. Just lame design choices: The bosses in this game suck, the Raid is cool but the Ender Dragon has always been an incredibly lame final boss, it never feels like a battle, it feels more like you're just disturbing some creature that wants to fly around, the beast has no presence up to that point either, when you get there you shoot towers as it flies in circles and maybe flies into you which might result in a bullshit fling into the void if it's at a funny angle or it will fire incredibly slow and pathetic projectiles at you, this is until it perches (and by perches I mean they place the model onto that bedrock thing and it sort of just sits there) so you can kill it, it doesn't even fight back whilst you stab its face. The Wither is a complete joke, it just flies around and smashes things, it feels like the kind of thing you shit out when you find those modding applications like MCreator and you make a terrible boss for the first time. It has a cool appearance and I like the sound design and also the idea of this ancient undead amalgamation but there's nothing to it, it literally just breaks blocks until you shoot it and then you have to hit it. Also the progression system has always been so bizarre, you can get gear good enough to beat the game in like 15 minutes (if the game doesn't spawn you on an island or a landmass with no natural caves for miles) and speaking of going miles most structures suck, the Woodland Mansion is really fun and cool but it's so just not worth it, all the loot can be gained from a raid and better loot can be found in shipwrecks or desert temples (guaranteed). The ocean temple sucks, its boring and tedious and all for a sponge and some gold. Nether fortresses don't have enough good loot to really expand upon the progression and wither skeletons can be stopped by putting some blocks to make them bang their heads like that one stormtrooper. End cities? They're honestly awesome, poor structures like this please, great loot and an elytra that can only be acquired from there along with a really unique and dynamic way to get through them by using the very specific enemies found there? It just proves to me that Mojang can make fantastic structures if they try (hopefully those trial chambers are worth it). By the way if you prefer old combat you've just admitted that you'd rather have combat boil down to who has the best autoclicker and not somewhat interesting thought and skill, the game should have even more going on in terms of combat, Spartan Weapons and Spartan Shields but a bit more toned down is a good basis.

One of the first matches I made a really cool build where I was tanky, had a second life, heat-seeking missile rounds and a field I could deploy, it allowed me to play from either a distance or right up close, despite how OP this sounds my opponents were still dangerous. One armed with artillery railgun fire from the skies and a very deep health pool and the other with a huge barrage of bouncing rounds that can leach life balanced out with a very shallow health pool.

The last match I won the first few rounds, which somehow ended in them building up nuclear Death Stars from their fingers whilst I had like 3 cards because they kept destroying each other whilst I cowered in a corner.

Definitely not one I can praise, the tutorial and the weird furniture land are well put together but by the time you get to orange hell it seems to lose what it was attempting to get across.

The narrator states that every obstacle he placed he couldn't bring himself to change it to make it easier, but orange hell seems to contradict that, it feels less like the first two segments where you have to think around the different kinds of obstacles and their positioning and instead it's just a bunch of steep rocks. For a "hard game" it doesn't have much of a drive to complete it out of spite that better games like Super Meat Boy have. Every failure is just an unmotivating back to square one, I was never thinking "I have to complete this because I won't let it frustrate me to quitting" it feels more like "oh wow I'm back to that fucking tree again, I'm just bored now".

I guess that's part of the metaphor, that creating art is a difficult process that can leave you starting over again, but I feel like if the game was more so a fair but difficult challenge as opposed to being really clunky and having sections which literally are designed so that you have to start over means that the theme has a level of pretention.

Honestly, the commentary is pretty pretentious too, it's not really saying a whole lot in particular, Bennett Foddy just says a bunch of disjointed things about games and difficulty and some of the quotes are pretty piss poor to be honest.

He says: "An orange is sweet juicy fruit. Locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice."

If that's the case then what even is the point of the game? Most games that have a task to complete are made for the glory of completing it, the feeling of figuring out the correct method so solve a puzzle, finding the skill to overcome a difficult series of platforms, finding the right strategy to defeat a foe. If we believe Foddy's thoughts on a challenge it makes it sound as though he made the game hard just so he could make it hard. Him splicing in some quotes doesn't make that any less the case, the game is as pretentious as they come.

I don't hate it at all, I appreciate the attempt, but I feel like it's not really offering me anything at all. The Stanley Parable is also philosophical and explores themes of creating art, but that game is much more focused and it has enough endings to explore different concepts in-depth. This isn't that, it's a guy rambling his scattered thoughts whilst he pretends that his hollow challenge has any sort of meaning.

I love it when games have themes and stories to tell, but this game feels like it's trying to hard to be that thing that explores those wacky ideas. Foddy seems to think masterpieces are made because the creator set out to make them, that only "B-Games" are made for the joy of their completion, but they're not, they're made because somebody realised a worthy vision.

TL;DR: man makes a hard game for the sake of making a game but puts some flowery words in it thus reckons his aimless and clunky void of meaning has any more significance than a banana duct taped to a wall... Oh wait.

Portal 2 is one of if not the greatest video game of all time, it's gameplay is obviously incredible; taking the polished and fun portal physics of the first game and placing them into puzzles.

This is of course combined with a sharply written narrative with whitty humour which is delivered by 2 phenomenal voice actors; Ellen McLain and Stephen Merchant.

This is all of course neglecting the great co-op mode, underrated yet investing soundtrack and wonderful aesthetic brought to life by graphics that have aged about as much as gold can.