I wanted to love this game but unfortunately it kind of became a slog by the back half. There's a great skeleton of a game here and it's presented beautifully, but it feels quite stretched to reach its runtime. I wouldn't have much of a problem with this if the gameplay loop held up throughout but, unfortunately, the combat gets extremely repetitive. The parry style is fun at first but the constant waiting for enemies to do the move I need them to do really wore on me and the lack of any physics based interaction with my sword led me to just waggle my wrist to whittle down the enemy's health as quickly as possible. The puzzles fair better but they too start to feel samey after a while.

The overall concept of playing as a god who can take control of mortals is great and I especially like switching between god form and mortal form to solve puzzles. I like the follower system overall but man are they dumb. I usually ended up just turning them off during combat because they'll constantly charge at enemies they can't do any damage to and die immediately. The game also has some very cool boss fights (the saga 2 and final boss in particular); too bad these are also repeated.

I was a bit let down by this one. Playing it right after Balatro did it no favors. Whereas Balatro's off the wall power-ups made every run feel unique, in Side Order the mod chips are very basic and the levels are repeated so often that it gets quite repetitive. I never felt like I had an interesting choice in which level I would pick because I would either choose it based off the most currency when I'm getting permenant upgrades or based off the best mod chip when going for the winning run. There's some fun to be had here but not a ton.