It's a very well-crafted game with cool mechanics like the use-anywhere hookshot and great pixel art, but I enjoyed little of it due to its masochistic bend.

The game is hostile to the player in ways that never feel fun: you can sometimes die before reaching a checkpoint after beating a boss (no autosaves), you can unlock an ability that lets you unlock an area only to find that you need another ability to progress further (sometimes you find this out multiple rooms in the area!!), enemies you killed respawn when you go in and out of a room, enemies are hell to avoid, rewards are scarce, and progression is sometimes completely unintuitive. For example, there's a terminal that hints at the possibility of a heat suit, which would help getting through the area that constantly damages you, right? Well, forget about even trying to find that, because you're actually supposed to get that way later, and you just have to run through the constantly damaging area until you get to a safe point, with no hint of this being the correct course of action whatsoever!

This unintuitiveness is reflected in some boss fights, too, with solving Serpent 5's attack pattern requiring just brute trial and error until you learn exactly how to cheese the AI, otherwise it encircles you and kills you near-instantly.

And this doesn't even scratch the sheer masochism required to get 100% completion by beating the infamous 'spike maze', or even the lesser fire maze before you get to that point, which is as far as I got before I realized I derived no satisfaction from beating any of the game's challenges. "Thank god that's over", I muttered. It then dawned on me that the game's challenge mainly comes from having to just brute-force your way through the environment, through trying different movement techniques to dodge bosses and avoid unfair situations where you literally cannot dodge their attack, and through solving most of these "platforming" challenges. You'll learn more about how to beat a boss by looking 5 seconds into a Youtube video just seeing someone dodge a specific pattern in a specific way, than you'll learn by actually having mastered the game's mechanics. Same thing goes for how to solve the "platforming" challenges, which oftentimes require unintuitive leaps of thinking by incorporating the hookshot in just the right way right before or after using a double jump/dash.

Also, the lore, which is only passable in the main game, just gets nonsensical once you get into the postgame content, so there's not even much of a reward for going through any of this torture. I am glad I spared myself, so I can devote more time to other hard games with actually rewarding gameplay loops.

Overall, if you like smashing your head against a wall, you'll like this game. Otherwise, I recommend just studying this station from afar.

One of my all-time favorite Metroidvanias! It absolutely nails the atmosphere - the graphics are low res, but all of the environments still look unique and detailed, and the music is excellent. The combat is tough, but the boss fights are really fun and very fair for the most part - you can almost always avoid damage once you learn their patterns. The level design feels really great - it's often tough to find the way forward, but it's never random or overly obscure.

There is also a pretty deep post-game, although it's a bit of a genre shift - it's got a lot of cryptic riddles. It's well made and has a lot of cool moments, but may not be enjoyable to everyone who likes the main game since it's such a different experience. Fortunately, it's totally optional.

Played on OG 512 Steam Deck without issues. Finally able to play without tinkering and I was disappointed by the hype but it was still fun.