Really kinda hoped I'd connect with what other people see in this on a replay (I was on the fence before) but unfortunately this snuffed out any gleam of potential I saw in it before. There's absolutely nothing to appreciate on the narrative side - the main story is bad, there's no real narrative to the side quests, the characters are underwritten and boring. The art direction is fantastically boring and lends itself perfectly to the bog-standard, uninspired generic European-style fantasy of the setting and enemy designs.

The world is laid out in basically the worst way possible - you go on long treks down linear corridors with no real points of interest. There's no meat to the world - no environmental storytelling, no history of the people, nothing to be learned about the structures and why they exist.

The combat is excrutiating - janky slogs where you spam one or two moves that actually do something while you run and jump awkwardly to avoid damage from huge enemies. Your pawns rarely use the right abilities when you'd like them to and you have no way of communicating anything to them. The climbing is neat - albeit very janky - but there's basically 2 enemies where there's a real reason to do so. Issues with the way damage is calculated in this game mean you will have combats with enemies where you do basically no damage if you are underleveled or not using the right damage type. This could be fine if there was any sort of signposting about it but very early on the game flings you all over the map.

I had remembered Bitterblack Isle as a high point of my previous playthrough - much more enemy variety than the pitiable assortment in the base game, less attempt at a story and more focus on the dungeon-crawling feel that marked the best moments of the main story. I was wrong. The encounters have no thought to them, the setting is boring and repetetive. The 3 boss fights before you meet Daimon (who?) are slogs with insta-kill mechanics that absolutely dragggg. The overall leveling in this game is completely busted. This playthrough I completed maybe 80% of base game sidequests, fought nearly all enemies I came across, and I finished around level 50 after beating the main quest. I farmed for another 10 levels before continuing on to Bitterblack Isle, and yet - despite spending hours after beating the entire base game grinding I felt completely and utterly underleveled for nearly all the content in the DLC. I've seen some people suggest that jumping in after NG+ is the way to solve this, but there's absolutely no way I'm playing through this ever again.

Really evocative and delightful visual design, fantastic synthesizer score, and perfectly tuned puzzles. The graphic style is Outer Wilds-esque in a way that really serves the alien X machine style that so much of the setting and characters have. Sounds are all really pleasing and otherworldly, and the synth soundtrack is great - sweeping in moments, very subtle in others, and used perfectly to indicate when you're on the right track with a puzzle.

Very interesting to have a puzzler with boss fights, but I think the occasional confrontations helped break up the core orb-based puzzles and provided some stakes that might've been missing if you were otherwise just wandering around. The puzzles themselves are clever and escalate in difficulty wonderfully. There are moments where you can just get in the zone and swim through the easy puzzles, and there are some real thinkers at the end to give the satisfying feeling of triumph, but it never gets too close to frustration. I played it in two sessions and it feels like the perfect length - I feel like the core mechanics were explored and it did not overstay its welcome.