This is a game I’d been looking at for a while before finally getting the chance to play it. The gameplay looked interesting, but I didn’t really expect the Metroidvania elements to be so well-integrated. They feel like natural progressions of what you are able to do, and the abilities make it fun to traverse and explore the world. Like most good Metroidvanias, it incorporates some backtracking and shortcuts, so most of the time it’ll never take you as long to traverse an area the second time. The gameplay really captures the feeling of a real pinball machine, with tons of fruits (the game’s currency) to collect popping onto the screen as you hit targets. The music and atmosphere is really relaxing and it’s a great game to just sit back and enjoy. It isn’t too long, which I don’t really mind. I’d rather a game be on the shorter side (<10 hours) but be fun all the way through than leave me feeling like it overstayed its welcome, and I think this game was a perfect length. Even though most of the game was fetch quests (which doesn’t surprise me since you play as a postman), the pacing and exploration aspects were done really well. Whenever it feels like you’re getting a little tired of a linear section, you come to a fork in the road or stumble onto a hidden path. The boss fights feel distinct and find a way to mix things up while retaining the core pinball mechanics that make the game unique (and it’s fun to play multiball. I really like how they reserved that for boss fights instead of overdoing it).

After all the praise I remember this game getting, I was surprised to find that I didn’t think it was that good. The time slow system is a cool mechanic in theory, but this implementation gives it what feels like an exponential speedup curve when you move, which makes it feel like I’m always moving ungodly slow or faster than I’d like to be, basically real-time. The gameplay is enjoyable enough, but I feel like the movement could have been polished to feel better by giving a gentler time acceleration curve. My biggest gripe with the game is the terribly written, in-your-face story that the game beats me over the head with every few levels. It completely kills the pacing and ruins the sort of flow state that these types of games should build up to be as enjoyable as possible. On top of being disruptive, the story itself is just bad. It feels like it was written by a twelve-year-old who just got their first taste of the Cyberpunk genre by reading Neuromancer for the first time and decided to write a fan fiction.

I’m not even sure why the game has a story like this. It’s not like it serves the gameplay at all or improves the experience. I think this concept would have worked much better as an entirely arcade-style game, like the modes you unlock after completing the campaign. Not every game needs a story. Let it be all about the gameplay and visual style, build some more levels, and I think I could have enjoyed this. As it stands, I’ll always remember this game as being frustratingly slowly paced thanks to the shoehorned-in story.