"Can you fry an egg on Mount Everest?"

Truly unique and deeply funny, this was a trip to experience. The core gameplay loop of cooking eggs (and increasingly stranger things) has a QWOP-like wackiness to it that walks a tightrope between being rewarding and comical vs. just completely frustrating and usually succeeds. The writing bounces between hilarious, brutal, and downright incomprehensible, and it works in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on. The world building is, I think, intentionally pretty fuzzy, which is both a blessing and a curse, but the PSX-style graphics and deeply janky animations give it a ton of charm and lets you fill in the blanks.

I do recommend playing with the sensitivity settings - playing on Steam Deck I found it really hard not to send things flying on the default sensitivity and had a lot more success once I turned that down a tick.

This game has some very cool highs - the platforming is snappy and exciting and the mechanics that get layered in really help complement that without, generally, feeling overwhelming. The difficulty for that platforming felt really nicely tuned where I had to learn to be responsive to what was happening and build some muscle memory, but rarely became frustrating or boring.

On the other hand, I thought most of the combat sequences felt pretty dull in comparison; any time I picked up the mini-gun it felt like momentum was just killed, especially in some later sections. The boss fights worked better for me for this, though they were a bit inconsistent.

I think this game suffered a bit from expectations for me, mostly because I heard a lot of folks compare it to Outer Wilds and I think this is fundamentally playing in a different space. That being said, I do think this game hits what feels like a growing trend of games like Tunic that trust in the joy of discovery of relatively simple mechanics. With no combat to speak of and a fairly limited set of "verbs", unlocking new tools, or even more significantly, stumbling on a new way to use an existing tool, gives a really cool "lightning bulb" moment as you shift your perception of how you interact with the world. There were moments that I thought I was legitimately sequence-breaking the game, only to realize a few hours later that the odd interaction I had discovered was mechanic that you really needed to find to fill out every corner.

I do think something that games of this style (Void Stranger evoked this same feeling for me, as well as some other more straight-ahead metroidvanias) run into, that may be inevitable, is a sense of fatigue once you've uncovered most of the world and you're trying to find those last few corners you need to peek into to finish it out. In this case it often involved squinting at the map trying to find what routes I hadn't taken or doors I hadn't unlocked.

Still, it's hard to deny how deep this game's hooks got in my brain while I was playing, and how satisfying some of moments of discovery were. I also have to shout out the gorgeous aesthetic that somehow still feels singular and fresh in a sea of pixelated indie side-scrollers - the design of the world and the environment feels deeply considered and cohesive in a way that really worked for me.