Lenna's Inception is a little hard for me to sum my feelings up about, because it feels like it wants to be too many things at once, at the detriment of the sum of its parts.
On one hand, it's an excellent Zelda-like with its own twists: it recontextualizes Zelda traditions like the trading quest and incorporates some charming, Undertale-esque pacifist themes to its narrative. Uncovering the lore of the game and seeing the main characters develop (to an extent; there isn't that much storytelling in the game at the end of the day) is a joy, as is the witty writing.
On the other hand, Lenna's Inception wants to be a procedurally generated game that appeals to the randomizer speedrunning community, with constant randomized seeds and speedrunner-friendly modes to cater to it. I think I understand where the developers are coming from with it, especially given that the game makes a decent amount of references to the sort of metagame exploits common in glitched speedrunning, but for someone comparatively distant from the scene, it drags down the rest of the game with it for me.
The fact that all the seeds are procedural means that someone's first experience with the game world will be nowhere near as elegantly and organically designed as Link's Awakening - one of Lenna's Inception's closest Zelda relatives alongside the original game.
While rare, it is allegedly also possible to find yourself in an unwinnable seed, or at least one that requires understanding of the game's less explained mechanics to proceed, which is something I doubt people will think of trying on a first run.
The same goes for the dungeons and various hidden mini-dungeons: they follow a roughly LA-esque "run into blocked areas until you find the dungeon item that lets you access those areas" kind of dungeon design, but are - mechanically and in design - about as shallow of the earliest dungeons of the original Legend of Zelda.
Depending on what you plan on accomplishing with your playthrough, the dungeons end up becoming a formality; something doesn't have much of a reason to exist.
The game allows you to skip dungeon bosses if you like, but locks most of the narrative behind confrontations with the bosses - meaning that if you decided to skip some, especially the later bosses, you end up missing out on much of the game's actual plot, which also results in a confused non-ending that doesn't even begin to hint at the charm that the full story has.
Finally, a handful of items - some plot-mandatory, and some debug tools that are available to acquire in the game world - just end up breaking the entire point of exploring the overworld and dungeons. The former plot-mandatory item is actually necessary to proceed in various parts of the game, meaning that there is no choice to not use it once it's acquired; even it alone can trivialize exploration, but when both are combined, there really is no point in playing the game "normally" in my opinion.
I feel like maybe these two distinct sides to Lenna's Inception would have been better off left as their own games, where each half could have been developed further than they currently are.
As it is, however, the dissonance between the game's ideas leave me incapable of rating this game alongside its two aforementioned Zelda cousins.
I'd love to see the developers pick a side for their next game, if it ends up being anything like this in its ideas. I can't say I'd be into it if they commit to the randomized speedrun approach, but I'd even rather see that than another game that struggles at cohesion.
On one hand, it's an excellent Zelda-like with its own twists: it recontextualizes Zelda traditions like the trading quest and incorporates some charming, Undertale-esque pacifist themes to its narrative. Uncovering the lore of the game and seeing the main characters develop (to an extent; there isn't that much storytelling in the game at the end of the day) is a joy, as is the witty writing.
On the other hand, Lenna's Inception wants to be a procedurally generated game that appeals to the randomizer speedrunning community, with constant randomized seeds and speedrunner-friendly modes to cater to it. I think I understand where the developers are coming from with it, especially given that the game makes a decent amount of references to the sort of metagame exploits common in glitched speedrunning, but for someone comparatively distant from the scene, it drags down the rest of the game with it for me.
The fact that all the seeds are procedural means that someone's first experience with the game world will be nowhere near as elegantly and organically designed as Link's Awakening - one of Lenna's Inception's closest Zelda relatives alongside the original game.
While rare, it is allegedly also possible to find yourself in an unwinnable seed, or at least one that requires understanding of the game's less explained mechanics to proceed, which is something I doubt people will think of trying on a first run.
The same goes for the dungeons and various hidden mini-dungeons: they follow a roughly LA-esque "run into blocked areas until you find the dungeon item that lets you access those areas" kind of dungeon design, but are - mechanically and in design - about as shallow of the earliest dungeons of the original Legend of Zelda.
Depending on what you plan on accomplishing with your playthrough, the dungeons end up becoming a formality; something doesn't have much of a reason to exist.
The game allows you to skip dungeon bosses if you like, but locks most of the narrative behind confrontations with the bosses - meaning that if you decided to skip some, especially the later bosses, you end up missing out on much of the game's actual plot, which also results in a confused non-ending that doesn't even begin to hint at the charm that the full story has.
Finally, a handful of items - some plot-mandatory, and some debug tools that are available to acquire in the game world - just end up breaking the entire point of exploring the overworld and dungeons. The former plot-mandatory item is actually necessary to proceed in various parts of the game, meaning that there is no choice to not use it once it's acquired; even it alone can trivialize exploration, but when both are combined, there really is no point in playing the game "normally" in my opinion.
I feel like maybe these two distinct sides to Lenna's Inception would have been better off left as their own games, where each half could have been developed further than they currently are.
As it is, however, the dissonance between the game's ideas leave me incapable of rating this game alongside its two aforementioned Zelda cousins.
I'd love to see the developers pick a side for their next game, if it ends up being anything like this in its ideas. I can't say I'd be into it if they commit to the randomized speedrun approach, but I'd even rather see that than another game that struggles at cohesion.