High highs and low lows. The 3D art is bland, possibly because I have no nostalgia for the PS1 look and certainly because I have no love for the muddy desaturated color palette. On the other hand, the 2D art is as strong as it was in Anodyne 1, and indeed is made stronger by the benefit of multiple worlds each with a distinctive and appealing look.

The plot is achingly predictable--the god-analogue is revealed to be a cold ideologue who's strangling free will? Quelle surprise! But the smaller-scale character interactions are fun and the writing is mostly quite solid with a few great moments and fewer terrible ones.

I think the most frustrating thing about this is that its mechanical ambition extends beyond the capacity of its control scheme. Movement in both 3D and 2D sections of the game is clunky in a way that's surely an intentional riff on the consoles the game evokes, but conflicts painfully with the challenging maneuvers it occasionally demands. It's a question of suiting the design of the tasks you set before the player to the context in which the player acts.