It takes a phenomenal amount of courage and confidence to make games that you know will disappoint, confuse, and anger people, especially when the reason is because those people love your previous games, and they are so attached to the characters and their memories that they don't ever want them to change.

But Naughty Dog does it, consistently, and with aplomb, delivering some of the most sculpted, crafted, affecting set piece games that exist. While it's impossible to ignore the specter of crunch required to create this level of detail and scope, it does not erase the admirable work and palpable love that has been poured into this game.

Like the first game, this is a game about love, but it's a much more visceral experience, bringing you through the lowest dregs of experience that can be attached to love. However, the value of the journey matches the cost.

On a moment to moment level, terribly fun and engaging, but the more time I spend with it, the more my frustration grows.

Malfunctions are generally either meaningless or ruinous (especially when it can be entirely beyond your ability to fix), attacks can hit you from across the room or phase through a wall (with warning, yes, but hard to parse in the moment, especially if you're dealing with other chaos), the tracking of certain enemy attacks feels overturned in speed and/or accuracy, and worst of all, they've admitted the team didn't have a shared and cohesive vision of the story. There's a big difference between intentionally crafted ambiguity that allows you to take the meaning that is meaningful to you, and just throwing a mish mash of aesthetic ideas that look cool together. On top of that, runs are bit too long for how many times they want you to repeat this experience, the idea of actually unlocking all weapon traits or logbook entries is exhausting. I really wish they would have halved the biome lengths, especially if that would have allowed them to add another act.

But, despite all of the above, again, it's very fun!

I enjoyed, but wasn't entirely sold on Axiom Verge 1, and for very different reasons, that's where I land on 2 as well. The art was a constant treat, and the exploration was largely satisfying and interesting, with only one point where I felt truly stuck as to where to head next. In addition, I felt so much less of a need to run my weapons over every wall in order to discover hidden blocks, which was a huge frustration I had with 1. However, the story is chopped off frustratingly suddenly, and the weapons, and therefore combat as a whole, are far less interesting and varied here.

Never played it as a kid, felt an obligation to check out the origin of the series as an adult. I can see how I eventually would have internalized the game, with endless summer hours to sink first beating, then mastering it. How the songs would drill their way into my subconscious, and become those things you casually hum without even thinking about it years later.

As an adult, I appreciate how much of the series is present from the start, laugh at some of the stranger choices (like having a scoring system at all), and really shake my head at some of the difficulties. Ice Man was the first stage I tried at, and even using save states to ease the tedium, I had to walk away from the section where you jump across Foot Holders.

It's a fun experience, greatly enhanced when you choose to not repeat the sections you know you can do without problem. Above all, I'm grateful that enough people cottoned to it that we got many more.

Shout out to the Fire Man and Elec Man tracks.

Yep, I sure did make fun of my friends for playing what looked like such a simple experience, all about numbers going up and up, and then poured dozens of hours into it myself once I gave it a try.

It's not easy to make something this simple, on its face, this compelling, but the rhythms are satisfying without being mindless. Having beaten it repeatedly now, I have my patterns, and am loathe to vary them, but I know mine are by no means the best, nor what my friends use, which shows the craft of the developer at work.

I always hated art class. It's the only time my parents had to be called in to have a one on one conference with the teacher. A combination of poor dexterity and perfectionism led to me declaring that I just wouldn't participate. Even to this day, I am intensely self critical of any endeavors that require me to revisit those skills. So it was to my great surprise that this game not only well and truly won me over, but had me painting in ways the game doesn't even require.

Thankfully, cleverly, the game restricts your toolset, especially at the start of the game. Therefore, any painting you do is almost certainly unable to match what you see in your head. You just have to do your best to translate it. The lack of control frees you from the demands of getting it right. The world is also full of things that cause you to splatter paint unintentionally, leaving messy spots that you know aren't your fault. That makes it all the easier to leave them there and make it part of the composition. By the time you gain greater control over your abilities (and they never get so precise as to demand great skill), you've had plenty of opportunity to break free of any expectations you may have for yourself.

The characters around you praise you from the beginning, and it's easy to dismiss it as just the text of the game, which doesn't actually reflect what you do. However, as one of the singular Wielders of The Brush, anything you do really is that exciting to these people, and a style that is forced to be unique from the previous Wielders forcibly sets you apart from comparison. Most importantly, once you start to talk with the previous Wielders, the platitudes that others throw at you begin to lose their insubstantiality, as you see them wrestle with their own faiths and doubts that are so likely to mirror your own.

Throw all of that lovely characterization, game design, and thematic work on top of a thoughtfully crafted world, full of small joys, and a exploration system that is full of just enough smooth puzzles to be satisfying, and you have an entrancing and heartwarming experience. Even to those who feel like "Art is not for them," I would highly recommend Chicory.

Edit: (And the fact that I can write this whole review and somehow forget to mention the beautiful music by Lena Raine underscores how entrancing the whole package is.)