"lf only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances... Now, that would be interesting." ~ Albert Einstein
Sephonie is the mythical game that he was alluding to. We found it!

Cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback finally make their 2D → 3D jump in spectacular form with Sephonie, which dares to imagine if your favorite cult-classic PS2 platformer had actual pathos, global concerns, and character development
It possesses environments with a haunting atmosphere like if the first Jak & Daxter game grew up by 20 years, attained a respectable career as a biologist, and took MDMA.
Achingly sentimental, but that's a good thing, you fucks are too irony-poisoned nowadays, toss out your depression memes into the recycle bin and try to form an actual bond with your fellow humans, Sephonie will teach you how
Memory is a fickle and suggestive thing, loss even moreso, and this game engages with these topics in such a way that you form an ONYX Mindshare with the themes and your own memories comingle with those of the main trio, where your memories sync with theirs and where they differ and the cognitive distortions that you four have in-common

HQ may have coincidentally landed on three kids of similar background to steer this ship but I truly think that this game describes memories in such a way that everybody will find something here to relate to, and if LGBT themes and the struggle to maintain a sense of Taiwanese identity in the wake of generational assimilation and a hegemonic unpersoning of the whole country is something of personal significance to you, that'll just magnify its emotional impact
Anodyne 2 was an easy 5/5 and Sephonie proves that Analgesic's talent is not a fluke and that they have a bright future ahead of them, can't wait to see what they come up with next

This game reminds me of the time I went to the National Park with my ex and his friends and surrounded ourselves with nature while I kept watch over his friends doing psychedelics. I did not take the psychedelics. Sephonie makes a compelling argument that maybe I should have.

Sephonie lays bare the truth, that the entire unabridged tale of human history is told by fragments of a whole, when we hurt others, we hurt ourselves, because we're kin, but we're not just kin, we are each other
Identity is important but it's also just a thin A.T. Field protecting our identity from becoming part of the same juice as every other person alive or who will ever live
Every part of the island harmonizes with every other part, because they intuitively understand the one truth, that being a cohesion we as humans have never been able to achieve because we're all screaming out for someone to love us and praise us and see us for who we are to ourselves, we lack the ability to reckon with our shared personhood because we're caged in our own skin and caged by our own egos, so when are we going to take the damn hint marker?
Ashes to ashes, Dust to Dust

"People killin' people dyin', children hurtin', I hear them cryin', could you practice what you preach? Would you turn the other cheek?" ~ William James Adams, Jr.

Fresh off Crash 2 and 3 and after enjoying Jak 1 thoroughly at the time of its release, begging and pleading with my parents to let me play this game because it, unlike its predecessor, (gasp) had a T-rating, "I'm gonna kill Praxis" made a psychic impact crater on my 8-year-old brain
I eventually wore down my Dad into buying it for me while we were sitting at Burger King
I could barely get this game so you know sure as shit my parents wouldn't even let me be in the same room as GTA, which made anything like it a sort of occult forbidden object
Open-world games were chaos, and I lived in a world of order, manicured for such objects and selected out, but this game got through
With all the effortlessly edgy aesthetic of a non-existent cool older brother, Naughty Dog's voice-cracking awkward puberty had everything I could've wanted at the time, like a character from a game I already played suddenly talking and having a cool SSJ transformation going absolutely sicko mode, it had police state dystopia, it had a fat guy in a hoverchair, cars, guns, and even Swear Words
I don't know if I dare revisit this game because it might not be as cool as it was in my memory
Jak 3 was received eagerly, preordered (!) and devoured with day-one pride, Jak X blew for reasons my young mind was incapable of articulating despite CTR being evergreen, and then Naughty Dog really dropped off and never made a game that would keep me hooked enough to finish it ever again
Unkarted remains unseen to this day, let alone The Laps of Us

I don't think there's a single review of this game anywhere online, sure there's footage and a leaked build, but no review. Let's change that!

A relic of Capcom's prematurely terminated "Namco Generations" remake series, produced by the absolute fucking legend Hideo Yoshizawa who leant his cinematic flair to Ninja Gaiden and then Klonoa, Aero-Cross would've been the third release in the lineup after Pac-Man Championship Edition DX and Galaga Legions DX, remaking the classic Metro Cross, but took two years in development hell before taking a cancellation to the face
Probably should've played Metro Cross before writing this but I haven't, and we're here

I had always been fascinated with this game since years ago when I saw on PSNProfiles it's one of the few games in their trophy database that has exactly one person that achieved its trophies, and that's because it never came out and the single player was a tester, similarly to its other canceled (and still unleaked!) sibling, which was a remake of Dancing Eyes, Namco's mid-90s 3D evolution of the "Qix, But Horny" subgenre (think Gals Panic)

Aero-Cross is decent for a canceled game, basically feature-complete, I like the soundtrack and the vibes of "caffeinated overly-literal interpretation of The Running Man (1987 film)" that it lends, I like the weird hypnotic robot announcer voice saying things like ground trick, jump trick, slipstream ad infinitum, makes the game feel like past-visions-of-the-future ASMR where mankind's problems have been fortunately solved, everything has become fully-automated luxury communism and the only thing left to do for humans is to perform acrobatics on floating strips of anti-grav highway
But it's definitely the kind of game that makes an exhausted executive take fifty (50) tries to beat Stage 2-2, then they beat Stage 2-3 on his first try (this happened to me) and then they shitcan the whole game for having fundamental problems, like not really being apt at teaching somebody how to play it

The official trailer (https://youtu.be/qt00OxDKXb4 is really like night and day compared to former prototype discussion forum Assembler-Games member Protodude's footage (https://youtu.be/i0wPPy1Pbdw)
This fella has put more time into it than I have and he's still falling into pits and running out of time before the stage is over
The timer always runs out too quickly, if you play about as well as a normal human can be expected you will make it with fractions of a second left, and due to the poor depth perception of the side-angle view I'm falling off a lot more than the guy in the trailer who is hitting every jump, somehow
It can't be input lag because some shmup guy did some tests on his favorites and documented the emulator only added like a quarter-frame of input lag, god bless shmup guys

There are these floating orbs that hang over the stage that you're supposed to tap A when you make contact with their hitbox in order to perform a Jump Trick, but good fucking luck triangulating their position in 3D space in order to do that, so you're going to fall into the pit, and then there will be the laborious animation of you climbing out of the pit while the timer still annoyingly ticks down, you knowing full-well that you have already blown the stage before you're even halfway through
Some other details; stage 4 is rainy, which we always love, also there's a customization shop where you can trans your gender and even your race, as well as buy uwu cat-ears, the outfit from the original Metro-Cross, and of course, Pac-Man paraphernalia like wearing his severed head
I wish I could check that succulent checkbox and tell you that I am the only human being on the planet outside of the original dev team who has mastered this game, but I couldn't even get past the third stage, the fact of the matter is that the only people who mastered this game were the people who likely spent a couple hundred hours designing and tweaking its levels
Hideo Yoshizawa could've saved the whole NG initiative from that persnickety executive if he added 30 seconds to the timer on every level, and removed all the bottomless pits, and added some kind of light-up HUD element that tells you that if you press the A button while it's lit up, you are guaranteed in-range to perform a trick and gain air
Here's hoping what with the wheels coming off the whole endeavor, that it didn't immolate the bridge between him and his former employer so hard that they'd never allow him back for Klonoa 3

P.S.: there are two leaked builds of this game, one is the PS3 demo which only lets you play the first stage, and the other is the complete(?) Xbox 360 version which is the subject of this review, and which you can only emulate through Xenia if you extract it out to a folder and boot the .xex file, otherwise it hangs infinitely on load
Presumably the PS3 demo contains all of the content too, as the file size is actually bigger, but nobody has been able to crack it into letting you play all six stages, if that's even possible
Have fun for an hour until you get bored! If you somehow figure out how to master this game I'd love to hear your tips in the replies below, and if I ever figure out how to play it really well I'll do just the same