LOVED this game.

The leitmotif is wonderful. Have had it stuck in my head since I started playing and now still after. Various variations pop in randomly. I'm humming along.

Beautiful expressive platforming. You are pretty quickly doing some wild stuff. It's really good at unlocking your platformer potential for you. I don't have to look up how to double jump off Cappy to get to secrets, the wild shit is just baked in and gradually taught. And yeah you can still do the wild shit for secrets because it's a platformer. As it should be.

Every key species link story moment is absurd. Resounding, thoughtful, intriguing. Feels like a culmination of years of itch style storytelling in games.

Really cool.

Easy to see this as a young guys homage to the Internet culture he grew up with, and the complicated feelings those permenately embed in one's psyche. We get that made manifest in the wacked out visuals, distortions of photography made to move via digital effects. The writing is flavor text, but reveals anxiety about climate change, the 1% ruining the world for their own short term gain, and the comedy all this chaos generates.

This almost works as a music video for a lot of great music too. All those times you picture a lil video to a song you love, this guy made that real. One should put live death grips concert footage in their game.

Also why does the second top review here say: "but there's a lot of depth and value here if you're willing to look beyond the dithered pixel art and electronic music surface"? I have many quibbles with this, but what does it even mean? Isn't that a lot of the game, it is extremely deliberate and gives most of the game it's affect?? Why would you need to look beyond it, and why are visuals and music a "surface" to games? What happens when we gaze at that very surface?

More proof that people should like my far superior reviews.

Another game that started out high for me and quickly dropped and dropped in my opinion. Man, they make games too long.

First off, I think this is really good for what it is. I also don't think I personally like this style of action game, more on that below. I mostly don't get why people complain about it. There's a couple silly obtuse things like buying the guard and dodge, but it's still a fairly straightforward button masher (on normal).

I don't think the overhead combat is as fun as a Bayonetta style. I also don't think the color indicator style of combat is good at all. It lacks expressivity. When using the guard you have to learn what sortve colors and moves (I think?) will actually be guardable. And then certain enemies can only be attacked with certain of your weapon types. That's not good gameplay imo. It's still cookie cutter, the designers are still telling you the only action you can take, there's no creativity.

Leading into my next point and why I gradually just couldn't bare to load this game up anymore. There is A LOT of combat. I literally would see the combat initiate and start exhaling in frustration, until I realized that's the whole game of course and decided to abandon the thing. But it's almost comical, there starts to be two guys to take down of every guy youve already seen, the same combat arena has multiple spawns. I mean it's just too much combat. Your attacks never get stronger so you never go through health bars quicker. Why did they make the bosses health bars so long? It's almost funny, maybe the jokes on me? You see so many different colors. And losing battery makes things slower, but not more interesting.

Overall, besides combats, I really like the vibes! The shiny character portraits, the bombastic set pieces (end of chapter 1 was a highlight of everything I played), the music is silly and so is the dialogue. People are being rubes to complain about any of that stuff. Level theming is good (It does devolve a little into ice and fire generic levels it would seem - another complaint tied into length). If this was half the length I would've happily beaten it and awarded a whole star or 1.5 higher honestly!