an insane psychotic trip through retrofuturistic hackerman renditions of cyberhell mixed with absolutely bonkers SFX and music… and a goddess-empress trans (?) AI antagonist. the gameplay is surprisingly solid by contemporary standards for something which appears superficially to be as outdated as a game can get. but it’s just an FPS metroidvania, in essence. combat can be obnoxious and movement can be weird but it's fine the overwhelming majority of the time.

if i hear one more person say "it's like an OS" or "it's like controlling a tank" im going to stab myself with a Laser Rapier™.

initially i liked this, but after thinking about it more it's just self-indulgent melancholy porn whining about... people trying to interpret the intentions behind the creation of art? sure, projection is a thing, that doesn't mean it's a thing in every case of trying to divine someone else's intentions ever. lmfao people will eat up anything if it has the superficial appearance of being deep through abstractness, unconventionality, and being "postmodern" (lmfao) i guess. this game is pretentious, unsubtle garbage. and no it's not because it's a walking sim. The Stanley Parable was made by the same person and is good (if similarly unsubtle, though it works to its benefit there), as is What Remains of Edith Finch and Paratopic and probably plenty of other walking sims. play like, Yume Nikki if you want a weird exploration game/walking sim that isn't as self-indulgent.

let's make a really good if admittedly slower-paced fighting game with great netcode that's able to rope in a lot of newcomers to the genre through coomerbait and good music but, get this, we fuck it up with a lobby system held together with sticks and lizards that works 50% of the time 100% of the time.

also the HUD is really lame relative to ones in previous games even if it's more polished.

it's still great and i'm still having a lot of fun with it so i refuse to give it below 5 stars.

TESTAMENT IN SEASON 2 BABY!

EDIT: TESTAMENT IN SEASON 1 BABY!

this game rules, i even consider it one of my favorites, but it has awful game design by conventional standards. that could be excused if it leaned into pure simulation non-game territory like it's big brother Dwarf Fortress, but it's clearly still trying to be a video game. yet it's tedious and repetitive as fuck. it's an open world game with like, less than 20 quests? most of them are apart of the main quest line--which is solid, the writing of this game rules--but being a roguelike, an open world roguelike no less, it's not exactly fun to do the main quest line over and over again with no variation. the game gives you very little ability or incentive to play any differently from just following the main quest in the exact same way every run, and there's very little compelling content outside of it. i would love if this game took cues from like, any other open world game, instead of trying to hang on to its increasingly diminishing influence from more traditional roguelikes. i hope these flaws get rectified, as this game is certainly going to be updated post-release, but they seem so essential to the design of the game that i'm not sure they will be. as of now this game is more fun as a sandbox for modding than it is as an actual video game.

if you enjoy, like, ADOM or NetHack, you'll probably love this. if you enjoy, like, DCSS or Brogue, this probably isn't the game for you. if you've never played any of those games, much less heard of them, you should probably stay away.