These folks set out to make an accessible city builder and the game absolutely nails it. Genre staples are carefully simplified and clearly explained, information is well laid out, and the map ends right when stuff starts getting really unwieldy. It's also fun! Your little guys run in a panic if you delete a road they're walking on. Your miners whistle little ditties and the music is super sick and well-thought out. The interplay between mining and building out your city is super engaging. The combat is not something I dread, a rarity for most games in this genre!
It's not the One True Game that will keep you warm for a thousand years. However it's a perfect intro to the genre, works surprisingly well with a controller, and i went back for a second round.

There's a charming and intentional minimalism at play here, from the limited number of bots and islands to the lack of stats presented through the interface and lack of combat. Sometimes the minimalism drives so far it leaves you without any understanding because it is fundamentally a bit buggy and unpolished, but: i spent 20 hours on it, it's a great steam deck game, and while it didn't really give me anything fundamentally new to the genre, it gave me enough to chew on and consider what is truly important for supply line/automation games and what isn't.

I really bounced off Breath of the Wild. A lot of the things that I didn't like about BotW are still here - inscrutable upgrade trees, incomprehensible signposting, a combat treadmill that wants you constantly off balance. The additions, though.... Boy howdy.

I think the ultrahand puzzles made so much stuff much more legible to me. It's way easier to know what a puzzle demands of you when you have a toolkit of predictable pieces in front of you instead of a vague expectation that bombs and stasis should combine "somehow" from BotW. I might have ended up building the same three vehicles over and over but they were fun to make and slightly alter, and the environment did demand I alter them! Using a spring or a rocket is just gleeful, man.

Ascend is a genius act. It's satisfying, it makes you think differently about your environment, it gives you a nice natural exit to some of these caves rather than a Skyrim-esque "and now we loop back to the beginning with a hidden door".

And the chasms.... A key part of the Open World Game is filling in the map and getting bored because your map is filled in. So the chasms just take that away and dare you to go into the dark. It's great! AND, the more you explore the chasms, the more you can infer about the surface (& vice versa) because temples and lightroots are stacked on top of each other.

There's still weird friction. Cooking stuff one meal at a time and then selling it one meal at a time is slow and obnoxious. It's also the best way to make money, but this is never explained and relies on hidden knowledge that means the sooner you run to a walkthrough, the better. Hunting for butterflies and bugs goes from a nice surprise to an absolute slog when you need 50 of them to upgrade your armor, and then you're flooded with useless armor sets that all need those rare bugs too. The plot is threadbare and dodges any serious consequence in a series that famously does not give a shit about maintaining continuity! What's the harm in giving us a bit of consequence!

But all of these complaints are absolutely secondary. The important part is that the graven image of President Hudson must never touch the ground. You need to make wacky constructs to cart lazy Koroks around. There's a rocket here and if you stand on it and whack it with a tree branch you have exactly enough time to say, "My name is Link, welcome to Jackass" before you start plummeting back to the earth. A beautiful, wonderful toy that occasionally (foolishly) aspires to be more.

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.

its difficult for me to separate MY feelings from the game from the discourse from the game, so let me just say:
it's silly that after SkyUI was the most popular day1 mod for Skyrim to fix the useless menus that gave no information and didn't remember sort preferences, the menus in this game give no information (can't show weight and value in a list at the same time! can't show ammo type in a list at all!) and don't remember sort preferences.

its weird that the game wants me to scavenge everywhere for ammo but doesn't highlight bodies and also wants me to be having high octane gunfights that i am supposed to..... stop? to fiddle with corpses and inventory weight?

it is the blandest bland sci fi that has ever blanded. it couldn't get through the opening combat tutorial without an Alien reference.

it is full of spaces that are supposed to lend "realism" or "immersion" like toilets and supply closets but actually lend "frustration" and "emptiness" and "no sense of reward".

it wants to be a shooter where you switch between a bunch of awesome rare drop weapons and then gives you too many too hold and too many to swap between and oops you're dead anyway. there is no sense of the right tool for the job when a shotgun with the anti-personnel perk needs 10 blasts to take down the heavily armored enemy in front of you - on easy.

it wants to have a meaningful skill tree - and i do like the challenges to level up! - but ends up with a grey mush. levelling up felt like more of a chore than a reward.

i don't think its unsalvageable and i am admittedly a little pissed off because i had no ammo going into a story quest but i just wanted to roll my eyes the entire time i went from unremarkable ship corridor to unremarkable ship corridor with uninspired flat shooting. Destiny is right there!!!