I’ll keep coming back to this for years to come. Mechanically it’s one of the most tightly designed, fluid games which encourages speedrunning whilst still being friendly to the casual player. It goes balls to the wall in how it asks you to tackle and experiment with its gimmicks and mechanics/physics, despite their simplicity. It’s fast paced and your decisions come on the fly, but it’s never in the sensory overloading way. The game is smooth, quick to let you reset and perfect your run and walk back your mistakes. It’s made with the same understanding of its playerbase and demographics that Celeste was, so despite the intensity or perceived difficulty, it never grates. The amount of tech you can pull off by the end is as impressive as it is fun. While I’ve seen the story be ripped into online, I’d like to say that’s some of the point. The developers wanted it to be cringe in the way it was what you’d think was cool in middle school, and I think that it sticks the landing due to a full blown commitment to camp. Not that it’s what you play the game for, there’s a skip button loudly placed in the top left of your screen. But I think it’s a case where you can embrace the cringe or easily ignore it. Most overblown critique. It’s not like people pretending Fire Emblem Engage’s story was actually good, when it lost the entire campiness midway through.