Look, it's a good setting, and it's good sci-fi, but I can't shake the feeling that I paid $25 for this game to call me an idiot over and over again. Is the time loop really necessary? Do I really need an excruciating flashback of my slow and oncoming death because the sun kidnapped my ship while I was trying to find the exact place to stand on a travelling meteor? Do I need the creeping time pressure of a collapsing planet as I try to figure out the exact non-Euclidian route I need to take to get inside a tower that maybe has the next breadcrumb that might maybe make me feel like I've made progress?

Again, the setting is good. Each planet is different. It does fun things with gravity and perspective and it's genuinely creative. I just wish I was playing a walking simulator sometimes, because I'm old, and I get frustrated when I know that jellyfish are electrically resistant and this surface is electric but I can't figure out the exact sequence of steps I need to take in order to combine those two facts before the sun explodes and I get to watch a playback of my jerk avatar failing to solve a puzzle for 15 seconds over mournful music.

My primary emotions are embarrassment, anger and exhaustion instead of wonder and awe.

extremely great sense of momentum, great sound design, maybe a little hard to decode visually but that's only a problem in the "Liberation" stages where you are playing towards a specific objective beyond "move right".
it actually does manage to tell a story pretty well, although by the time you are chasing a helicopter through the trees it veers towards comic heavy-handedness. The heavy-handedness is in service of a good message that is well-enforced by the mechanics - the trees feel so good to swing through, and the deforestation is bleak and alien, and the cities are baffling and confusing but not impossible. You can feel how gibbons live best in their natural environment, and they can adapt, and people can adapt, but adaptation is difficult.
i finished the story and immediately wanted to keep playing. the liberation mode isn't as well tuned. that's fine. it's actually nice to be able to stop playing a game after a few hours.

you wouldn't think pinball and platforming would mix but yoku makes it work. sure there are going to be times you miss a shot and need to try ten or twenty times but that's pinball baby!!!! and its not dissimilar to missing a jump in a platformer and needing to clamber back up.

great soundtrack, fun writing.

some of the collectibles are a little fussy but they're entirely optional. i would rush to buy a sequel on day 1

On the one hand I think Gita really nailed the issue with D&D - reloading when i didn't Perceive correctly over and over in a cavern full of traps set me off the game for a month, easy.

On the other hand, when the game plays with you, it's glorious. TK'ing an enemy mage into their own AOE so hard they stop concentrating, kicking someone into a chasm, exploding barrels - I cackled the first time and I cackled the last time.

Some of the big combat setpieces are so clever and fun, and I really wish there was more of them! Too many of them were dime a dozen "here fight some guys, they all have no resistances and no weaknesses and there's nothing interesting about the environment".

So, you know. Big fun. Loved the characters. Dragged my feet a little in the last act. It's hard to put a number on that. I think Larian's great and I want them to keep making great, funny, fun games.

The "finish in 3 hours" achievement seemed possible, and the difficulty seemed interesting enough that I cranked it up. It totally transformed in my hands from a, fine, fairly mid exploratory platformer to a racing game. Suddenly those weird anomalies I limped my way through were tight puzzle to find the fastest route. The bosses became intense race courses whose tracks slowly dissolved. I threw myself into it with my whole voidussy and fell short by 5 minutes. So i did it again, and got the achievement :)

I think it's fascinating how the difficulty totally changed the game for me. Monsters weren't things to hunt down, but damage soaks only eliminated when you had time to spare. Shortcuts launch you across sections of the map as you race from anomaly to anomaly. Your health when you spend time exploring is easily supplemented by the troves of treasure in the nooks and crannies. But when you're on a time crunch, your health is suddenly limited by the genius decision to have each boss permanently slice away a bar, and you are forced to reckon with 1-2 slivers - which is fine! you shouldn't be taking hits anyway, and if you are, monster resets shouldn't be bothering you because killing them is a waste of time!

So this becomes one of the few games where I said "actually let's turn up the difficulty" as well as one of the games where I sat down and started a new game as soon as I finished the last. A memorable gem for me. (Still way too much dialogue, though, especially if you're trying to speed through!)

i was genuinely sad when there was no more game left to play. i finished and immediately went back just to tool around because moving around in this game is SO FUN. i would finish challenges and say, out loud, "that was fun", like a simp.

part of it is that it's super legible. you aren't left guessing what you're supposed to do, moving fast is clearly the best option and poking around the shrubbery is obviously pointless. jump points and grind rails are always clear, and the hardest thing is occasionally finding a grapple point with your eyes while you're speeding along (and, ok, fine the boss fights can be a bit... finnicky) (however the difficulty settings are beautiful and reasonable and perfect in that i was able to finish this game without feeling too stressed, but sufficiently challenged)

another part is that the level design is super cool. it takes medium advantage of its setting with a fair number of "impossible" vertical rises and perspective/gravity shifts, but mostly: the colors! the glorious colors!

i actually found the writing super overwrought and while I liked the voice actress I ended up turning the voices off because it just kept tripping over itself. way too invested in its own lore when i would have preferred a Souls-ian lack of exposition. however thats such a minor criticism when its just such a joy to move in this game.