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.

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.