Feels very...messy? At least narratively, where it both feels the need to nail down a certain allegorical tie to the bedtime-fable of its narrative framing, and have it be a child's own journey through grief by path of art. Maybe it's just a me-problem (as in, maybe I'm just an idiot), but the narrative overshadowed the gameplay, it reduced it all to mere set-dressing. Clever set-dressing, mind you, and not at all as trivial nor as numbingly repetitive as I feared. But everytime the story made itself known it lost me more and more. Everytime the story had to insist upon itself the gameplay receded further and further until the mechanics had been gulped up by self-indulgence. I like it less and less the more I think about it, and I feel that if they would've just let it be a puzzler about loss (instead of...whatever it ended up as) it would've been more effective.

Played enough of this now to realize that this is not for me. There's a place for games made for mastering, but I very much don't enjoy a game that offer nothing but that. A short game made long through inordinate difficulty is just not my jam. Might return once I git gud™, we'll see.

Sidenote: as someone who's far too young to ever play Arcade games or NES-titles until literally now, and as someone who has a severely limited grasp on the history of game development at the time, I don't know just how uniform the high difficulties are between different games, nor exactly why. If someone more educated would happen to see this and would like to give an explanation, be so kind.

Looks shamelessly bad for a game that runs this horrendously, but besides those glaringly obvious technical deficiences I still vibe with this series immensely. Virtually all of the new weapons are hits, and the added option for duel-wielding any two combination of guns means that battles can be staged at an even more ludicrous scale than before. It's not even near the same level of design mastery as DOOM: ETERNAL, but the singular nature of Sam as a franchise still ensures that there really is no other shooter series available that allows you to, for example, annihilate 200 enemies at once with a damn portable blackhole, or grind footsoldiers to a pulp while riding through a grotesquely picturesque French countryside on a combine. It's the little things here in life, ey?

I think my problems with this game arises primarily from its hyperlinearity; levels are designed in segments, meaning you have to clear the objects of one segment before being catapulted into the next. Seeing how the game's design is so clearly derived from KATAMARI DAMACY, I can't help but wonder why Esposito chose this approach to level design in favor of DAMACY's more free-form one. Here, the levels play themselves – chances are that if you just swirl around with the hole in a purely haphazard manner you'll still clear the course in five minutes or less. It's a puzzle game that requires little input, and even less thought, to beat. A sort of anti-puzzle verging on anti-game. Flabbergasted at how such a tap-in idea can result in such a nothing experience.