I deeply love the metroidvania genre. In particular, I've always had a preference to the less-castylevania games as well, finding faster movement, deeper verticality, non-architectural level design, and gun/projectile based gameplays more fun.

This is likely the only real exception I've encountered. The style and premise are right up my alley, beautiful pixel graphics and a fun existential scifi plot in what I dare to describe as a near-Gigeresque world.

And yet. It jut doesn't click for me. I found the gameplay loop of the gun switches to be clumsy, the drill was entirely unnecessary and could have been wrapped in with the scanner, the scanner also being pretty unfun and unwieldy to use. The game doubles down on one of if not the worst tropes of the Metroidvania genre, hitting every single tile of every single room. Pair this with what felt like pretty uninspired level layout, it just seemed so much more damning than pleasant.

I truly want to like this game, every part of my being says I should and that's why I keep going back to try it again thinking "maybe this time it'll happen" and it never does, and I have plenty of real marked complaints about the game but at the end of the day I don't think it's some awful game.

It's just not for me. It's probably not life changing amazing, maybe it's not even great, but it's not bad either. Give it a try if this genre is your thing, otherwise, maybe steer clear.