Overall, this is an incredible game with an extremely interesting way of going about solving the mystery of the Obra Dinn. As you happen upon different threads and start pulling, you start to realize that even though you're following an overarching plot of the major events on the ship, you're quickly pulled into individual plotlines as you try to identify each character and what ultimately happens to them. You find yourself becoming invested in each scene, slowly starting to go from a very superficial view of just the victim to paying more attention to details the game has been hiding in plain sight from the beginning. It quickly becomes very satisfying to see the book filled out with everything you figured out, regardless of how you reached the outcome because of the plethora of ways to reach one solution. For the full time I was playing, I became fully immersed in the world and found it easy to start pulling at strings and following them without realizing how much time had passed. It's a pretty perfectly structured game that lets you unravel the mystery at your own pace and is presented in such a way that even the ultimately straightforward story is extremely interesting.

There's an overwhelming amount of things to do in this game with simultaneously being not enough things to do. For as fun as the game can be at times, I often found myself without a sense of a goal or feeling any meaningful progression despite the immense amount of options for things I could do and gradually led to a lack of motivation to keep playing. The biggest offender was that finding better ships and multi-tools is effectively a random event, and it does not feel particularly rewarding to just happen upon them.

This game definitely makes some improvements on the first one, especially being backed by a more interactive story with plenty of characters each with their own motivations and views on the world. While it succeeds in establishing this tremendous world and leaves you with much to consider throughout the playthrough, it unfortunately begins lacking in the puzzles. There are plenty of mechanics that get used to a varying degree outside their own areas, but none of them feel fully explored. This leaves the endgame puzzles feeling extremely lacking and not super satisfying outside of the initial introduction of the mechanics, and I found this especially egregious and disappointing in West 3. While the mechanics are more interesting than the first game, they are not nearly as fully explored or built upon, which is disappointing for a game that presents itself as a puzzle game. However, they were still fun to explore and utilize the new tools to find solutions, and the story was incredibly interesting to follow along to while thinking about applicability to the real world.

The gameplay is really fun, and the roguelite elements are quite good. The story also feels pretty good and was nice to see Pearl and Marina interacting again. While having incentive to beat a run with every weapon was nice, the story progression feels a bit too frontloaded, so the full completion reward was not as satisfying to me. Even still, reaching the finale with the fanfare and Ebb & Flow remix felt wonderful as an ending to the first run. Overall, it doesn't hit the highs of Octo Expansion that I really enjoyed, but the gameplay and content are still very fun.

I did everything there is to do in this game, and the puzzles are incredibly fun to discover. The ideas and solutions build on themselves in super creative ways throughout the whole game, and solving everything feels incredibly satisfying, even the incredibly convoluted stars. Admittedly, this game likes to wax philosophical a lot in its texts, and most of the analogies went straight over my head. I was able to follow the base story easily enough though, so that felt straightforward. Overall, fantastic puzzle game with a neat story on top that ponders the several questions of life.

This game is an incredible metroidvania with very fun combat and fluid movement that feels great even without every upgrade. The mechanics feel very fun, each new upgrade improving both movement and combat felt very good as more and more of the map unlocked. I love games that push the extents of their movement abilities, so the constant sets of platforming challenges were also incredibly fun. Enemies were plenty varied and fun to fight. Bosses had varied mechanics and interactions with combat that felt really fun to fight, even if initially a bit difficult. The plentiful quality of life was appreciated, especially with the memory shards helping with backtracking.

My main issues with the game were the environments, backtracking, and ending (spoiler free). While stunning to look at with nicely varied environments to explore, there were often rooms that felt empty. Sometimes there were just rooms that served no real purpose or even the lack of objects like pots and stuff to break made it less interesting to backtrack a lot. Small wish that I could have interacted with the environment a bit more, but not a huge issue. In regards to backtracking, I wish the fast travel system wasn't as inconvenient to get around. The fast travel points ranged from being in okay spots to being not very useful to backtrack to. I found myself running through the same rooms too often just to get to a new part of the map or come back to something I had marked. Lastly, the ending and resolution to the story didn't feel particularly satisfying to me. I felt like there were bits that were unresolved, or if they were, did not feel executed well.

Admittedly, most of my issues were pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, only the ending being my biggest let down from an otherwise fantastic game. I would love to be able to refight all the bosses too, so a replay might be warranted in the future.