ends rather abruptly as these single-dev art games tend to. though in fairness I probably missed a lot. very good atmosphere. could never tell how much my progress was being the first to find a relic or robbing another party that had already taken it. a puzzlebox of a game with several other parties trying to solve it. oh you also start the game with estradiol lmfao.

a few miscellaneous notes:
-i know it's apart of the aesthetic but I would've preferred viewmodels that aren't just Source game screenshots or whatever the fuck they are

-only having 2 rotational sprites is annoying but i guess it's also apart of the aesthetic. game would probably lose some of its creep factor if there were more, idk.

-the short playtime is likely justified by how genuinely replayable it is due to how much you miss by virtue of there being agents which do what you're doing when you aren't looking

-it's utterly shocking that this is probably the first game i have played where (some) NPCs actually have game-mechanical agency analogous to the player, with the possible exception of some traditional roguelikes. and it's still incredibly rudimentary as far as I can tell. that's honestly kind of embarrassing for the medium; who wants power fantasies anymore? did anyone actually want them to begin with? how does having a Great Man player character with NPCs that are husks make for a good "RP"G? we need more games where Herobrine is real.

"what if we made titanfall but worse in every way"

the best of the big battle royales. which is not saying much.

also ~95 gb come the fuck on lmfao.

the entire game is just a bunch of chess puzzles. It's even on an 8x8 grid. so if you like chess puzzles...

...in all seriousness, i may just be bad, but it seems that the game puts you in lose-lose situations rather excessively whether by accident or design. this would be fine, and even ludothematically resonant with the utilitarian greater good and self-sacrifice themes often found in mecha and kaiju media, but a lose situation in this game means losing one of your three units (don't have them for the rest of a level and lose a pilot, who give critical benefits) or losing power (HP, you lose if it's 0). in other words minimizing losses in lose-lose situations is often just delaying a game over. and this is a permadeath roguelite.

i wish the defense grid mechanic was deterministic and just acted as a once-per-level (or multiple-per-level, if you upgrade it as you already can) shield/damage nullification for buildings rather than pure RNG. that seems like it would solve the problem completely, actually, and make the mechanic more in line with the determinism of the rest of the game.