that's so 2012 indie game of you

review update: i despised this game lmao, truly an exercise in tediousness
the narration was pretty decent but by the end the narrator didn't even seem convinced by the game anymore either; the writing / story was laughably dull and empty and the whole concept has been done hundreds of times, and way way better
not trying to hurt any feelings or whatever but i worry about the people who felt a deep connection to these rectangles because holy shit these are the flattest and most one dimensional characters i've seen in a game in a long ass time (and by flat i'm not making a pun, there's just nothing to see here).
puzzle games are fun when you get to think and figure stuff out; in this game, the "puzzles" are solved nearly instantly and 95% of the time you're spending in the level is just doing incredibly tedious busywork to execute the terribly dull path to the level exit. the game relies abusively on making you do the same things with multiple characters per level just to pad out the playtime, or make you wait ages for something to happen (there's a mandatory moving platform placed in a way that getting on it atrociously janky, and that platform takes a literal actaul 30+ seconds to get up to your character: if you miss your jump, you're stuck staring at your screen to until you get another shot (oh and the platform is outside of the camera field until you unzoom by moving another character through their path and the platform is revealed so you finally learn of its existence)...;this is one example of many and if you'd cut on the redundant bullshit and endless waiting around the game would easily be about 6 times shorter. also the controls are ass and the game is janky so execution is further bogged down by needless frustration rather than engaging challenge. this game is neither good at puzzling nor at platforming, and it only gets a full star rather than a half star because it looks decent if extremely monotonous, and the soundtrack is okay (it sounds like just about every single indie game soundtrack put through a woodchipper and then fed to generative AI but aside from its aggressive blandness it's not particularly offensive). other than that, there are hundreds of much better flash games, and this game isn"t worth your time beyond its value as a historical artifact, or if you're curious to see what all the people saw in this that "changed their life". i beat this game and i'm still left wondering

I really like the ambition behind this title and the horizontal sections are pretty neat but good lord the cockpit sections are absolute ass to play through, both because the sprite of the enemy/area of the enemy you want to hit vs the actual bit where the hit will register do not match up in the slightest, and it gets pretty frustrating to pump 10 shots into the center of a rock with no effect only to die to it. On top of that, you have to deal with some weird dialogue puzzle where certain options in a certain order will increase some score up to 100% which enables you to defeat the enemy somehow? There's no way to tell what wlll work or what options will evolve into so it just feels like blind guessing all the time, which is not a good way to make me feel like i have agency. Even worse, there are loooong periods of downtime between enemy attacks where there is just nothing happening and you're stuck waiting forever for an undodgeable attack to hit you in 0.75 second.
The run n' gun sections are basically just 2d mazes with fairly punishing combat and scarce resources. They're not the worst kind of mazes since you can map your way around with the layout depending on holes rather than some doorways or whatever. That being said it's still not the most fun thing to navigate, and the game's palette issues make the backgrounds not the prettiest things to look at.

What I enjoyed the most by far were the Ninja Gaiden-style cinematics, where you could tell the game was really trying to tell a story with well-defined characters and lovely art. The pure shoot'em up sections were, as I said, quite neat and the game really has a lot of ideas and ambition, which is something I definitely respect. I could have tolerated dealing with either the run n' gun mazes or the cockpit sections as individual sticking points but both in the same game just drag it down too far for me to keep enjoying.