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.

yes mega man battle network had an extremely dope combat system. it also had a plot, and interplay between the physical world and the cyberworld, and neat little things like packing special abilities into a grid, and cameos from characters we still find reasons to care about somehow.

this is a by-the-numbers roguelike with an admittedly dope battle system that unfortunately invites comparisons to a greater game. choose your route on a map. hyper-optimize your deck. weigh every choice like it's the last one you're going to make. repeat x1000 to learn a boss pattern.

it was neat seeing some of the bosses join me after fighting them, but gosh, once again: nothing like pulling out a GUTSMAN card!

sorry bud! i was rooting for you! i just can't stand the roguelike run structure!

It's neat having a kingdom sim running while you are out doing quests because it gives a little extra incentive. It's nice the kingdom building gives rewards to combat. But, the kingdom sim thrives on hiding information behind expensive and unbalanced upgrades. The higglies seem useless. It's hard to keep the item tiers in your head. And the plot is pretty standard (thank god for that skip button!)

I played it purely because I like the blend of kingdom sim + jRPG, and I enjoyed doing quests to recruit new people to my town. If that's not your genre jam-re, you probably won't get far.

i wanted a relaxing game that wasn't totally thoughtless, and this game mostly filled that need.

but: i gotta say after finishing almost the entire thing, it's a little wacky in practice. i found it hard to read the seed in my hands (especially wheat vs ferns - both are kind of tan, i guess? - or pothos vs monster - both are green???). it's hard to tell when you start a stage the exact moves you need to make to clear it, especially since your upcoming items are hidden. and more than once i got to the end of a stage, ran out of items, sighed and busted out a water cloud for a few minutes to get to 100% because the clear conditions are just not easy to figure out. i'm almost done with the game and i'm still not super confident what it takes. also the music is wholly uninspiring, i was really hoping for chill beats to etc etc etc instead of generic synths.

on the one hand, i basically finished the game, all of this stuff is mostly optional because there's an "unlock everything" button, and there's a creative mode. i didn't suffer any penalties for restarting (besides some kind of drawn out animation times for transitions and seed recharges). i honestly did make some pretty landscapes and chilled out.

on the other hand, this stuff is part of the game, and the majority of what you actually do if you don't engage with it as a pure toybox. it intruded on my chill game vibes. my recommendation is not without its criticisms

The range!!! This studio always makes games that tell wonderful, nuanced stories about existing slightly outside of systems, but also: the games are funny as hell. They are weird and delightful and silly and cutting and satirical. Also, mechanically, they are super diverse and do a great job of setting up interesting elements, making you stretch your brain a bit, and then moving on before beating you to death.
And yet every time, I spend years agonizing over "am I in the right space to play this?" Yeah, man, they're excellent. You should be running towards their latest release, not letting them languish on a backlog.

Much like the premise of this game, I too am occasionally wiped of my memory and thrust into a formless void of endless recurrence.

However, in my unstoppable cycle, I keep buying roguelikes. Surely, this time I will accumulate the knowledge I need. Instead, my true self is revealed - actually, i'm impatient, lazy, and bad with memorizing details - and I am instantly killed, losing all progress and sent back to the beginning of my cycle. Hey, this roguelike has citybuilding elements! This time this will work for me!

Zach, my dear Potato, let me contribute to your metagame progress. You hate roguelikes, dude. You hate the glacial sense of progression roguelites offer, you hate the frustration of starting over with a clean state after spending hours painstakingly eking out progress, and you definitely hate the wiki-first approach needed to make any serious attempt at victory. It doesn't matter how good the roguelike is. You bounced off of Hades, my guy. It's not the play mechanics, it's not the art style, it's the difficulty and repetition!!! Break free of the samsara!!! Take the materials with you from this run and make 1/19th of the progress needed towards this permanent building awarding +1 to your next decision making roll!

(This game is a work of art and worth the money you pay for it. I just have a difficult relationship with the genre)