I expected to love this game.

It takes inspiration from one of my favorite games of all time, the pixel art looked fantastic, the soundtrack looked great, character designs looked fun.

All of these things are still true at time of completion. My only gripe with it, the thing that really makes the rating be what it is, is its story. The writing in general is pretty good, but the pacing just kills me. The game opens with a breach in the status quo of our main character and keeps this trend by not giving each of these major story beats room to be properly explored and toyed with. The PTSD allegory and sci-fi concepts still hit and are extremely effective but at the end of the day the game could've seriously benefitted from being a couple levels longer, give us more time in this world before tearing it away.

The gameplay is still fantastic and the bossfights are inventive. I will be coming back for the eventual followup/DLC, I just hope these issues will be fixed.