This game whips, figuratively. I was enjoying it fine for the first couple hours until, during a boss fight, while panicking a bit and mashing buttons, I accidentally put in the input for a hadouken and it FUCKING WORKED. I just about lost my mind.

The real strength of this game isn't its clever nonlinearity (which isn't as nonlinear as it seems on the surface) nor its integration of dungeon-crawler logic into a side-scrolling arena (which feels increasingly rough as the game's space expands beyond its meaningful rewards), but in its layers of coyly concealed secrets. You could go through the entire game without realizing you can cast spells with fighting game inputs or any number of other quiet features hidden behind vague item descriptions.

The sense of possibility this produces is just as evocative as this game's lush last-hurrah-of-2d-console-games art. And the influence on the exploratory action-RPGs that defined games of the last decade couldn't be clearer. Although there are things I don't love about this game (the combat is only okay, the balance is frequently off-kilter) it's undeniably cool as hell and that counts for a lot.