I may or may not finish it to completion. I think what I'd have to say, especially coming off the back of Blasphemous, that the game doesn't feel so bad to play, but that I can't recommend it unless you are very sad and bored.

Every part of the experience feels slow even after you have the majority of your movement options unlocked. The dialogue with the characters, if you choose to engage with it, the traveling between locations, the accruement of currency, the long stretches of empty hallways and bland corridors. I feel like this game has a lot of good ideas but there's just so much nothing despite every path leading to some sort of reward. Despite having things to go and collect that improve your character incrementally, I can't help but fall asleep while I dash through needlessly long corridors with at most one or two enemy types. Why can't we fast travel to all of the save points? Maybe that dev thought that would make the game too fun. If you want to backtrack for exploration you have to WORK for it; and by work I mean tediously manage your stamina gauge to run and dash at peak efficiency while literally nothing else is happening 80% of the time. The atmosphere is so... mild. The music is nice and moody, but it never really stands out, or becomes more than that. The world just feels so barren. A shame really, I enjoy the visuals.

Mechanically its all there, you got a dash, you got a wall jump, you got a double jump. But man, moving around just feels so, sluggish, I'm not sure why, when you play Super Metroid it always feels like Samus is just trucking it, but here the rooms are just so wide and full of empty space. The main goal of the game is going out and collecting these ship parts, but while you have the parts you can't fast travel (which doesn't matter anyways because there are very, very few fast travel nodes, this just makes it take very little more time for story? reasons, I don't know), and these green skull things attack you. Of course, the parts range from, ehhh sort of close, to VERY far from the delivery point. It's all just so tedious. Why? I have been trying to wrap my head around what the developers thought the return sequences added to the game. Its not really like tense or anything. Its just a boring walk and climb through the same hallways as before, maybe with a few more enemies.

I wish to not be so mean. I hope the developer learned a lot from shipping this game. Apparently its been in development from kickstarter for just under a decade. Looking at past beta footage, I feel like I don't understand how the game artistically arrived where it did. It feels like the devs played Hollow Knight and were like "whoa dude, this is way better than what we're working on" and then preceded to rip the design asunder into something bland and lacking its own identity. Ernestly, why would I play this over Hollow Knight, or Super Metroid, or Metroid Dread, or anything else in the genre. Because its new? Those are some REAL contenders; for sure, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but this one has no innovations for me to applaud, and the story and characters are just not captivating enough for me to not want to just grab my switch and replay Dread.

Kind of awkward mechanics, puzzles mainly reliant on observation, short, mostly downtime walking. Ehhhh. Coming off the back of playing Viewfinder (and hating it), I feel softer on this game despite not really being that invested in the narrative. That said, I appreciate the artistic vision the director had for this game and I actually do think the Maquette as a set piece is really interesting, and overall was this neat sort of unfolding thing with each element symbolizing evolving parts of the main character's relationship.

While a sort of basic tale about the nature of relationships and self growth (read, shallow but not offensively, just blandly relatable), parts were well delivered, and some of the visual art on display was really fantastic. I'm not sure if all the music was original for this game, but it was pretty good too. I think if you have gamepass and would play something that looks like this have a go; though, I think in retrospect I'd say its kind of middling.

Biggest issues are that objects are clunky and its not much of a puzzle game, more like a "Whoa you gotta like, look at things a different way bro." But the gimmick is you are literally doing this in the game as the main character has to look at things differently in his life. Its a short narrative driven walking sim masquerading as a puzzle game. I think its cute, but unfortunately cute only gets you so far. 50% cute 50% boring af.

Kinda boring, but I love rock climbing and it was pretty, the music was good too. I would describe this as something like a voiceless Ghibli film but its a video game and around 3-4 hours. Take that for what you will, but you'd probably get the same experience playing this game if you just watched Howl's Moving Castle or Ponyo with an Xbox controller in hand, and alternated holding the left and right triggers for the duration of the movie. Truthfully, I'm just jealous that the main character climbs V18 and on sights 5.16a without breaking a sweat.

I picked up automata on a whim when I went to a gamestop randomly to buy some other thing that wasn't available. Since the game I was looking for wasn't there I said screw it, lets pick this up since people were saying good things about it and I hadn't played a platinum game before. Best purchase I ever made for my PoS4. This game has a gripping story, with excellent characters and direction, without a doubt the best OST ever composed for a game, and the single greatest contribution to video game butts ever.

While at points the gameplay gets tiresome (particularly the hacking minigame in Route B and onward), this game is without a doubt in my top 10 GOAT list, and is an experience I think about fondly.