Recent reviews by Exploded Coffee

Pros

Parts of this game were visually striking. There's a section in the dark which brought stark contrast different coloured cubes that you need to use to solve the puzzles.

The soundtrack was effective at creating an atmosphere of unease that spurs you forward.

The visual feedback on the hands of the main character were well done; I found the way they changed colours depending on what you were aiming at to be an intuitive way to confirm what I was pointing at/affecting.

Cons

As a puzzle game I found this flat. Many of the puzzles solve themselves if you activate elements in the order that you encounter them. The puzzles that took the longest to solve were mainly due to trying to get the physics system to react the way you want rather than finding the solution to the problem. The core problem solving system - a series of different coloured cubes - felt shallow: all of them boil down to being able to "push" away from a wall. A couple puzzles also required out-of-game knowledge to complete. Specifically those centered around light and physics. You need to know beforehand how to mix two different coloured lights to get a required colour or how objects of different masses will behave differently if the same force is applied to them. These are concepts that should have been introduced earlier in the game or a reference should have been provided somewhere on those puzzle-levels. I can imagine players not familiar with these to get stuck and have little recourse other than to search online of a solution.

I found the narrative of the director's cut distracting. Much of the context centers around the psychology of isolation and the international space station and much of the narration just didn't come across as realistic. It feels like only shallow research was done when writing up the script.

I found the visuals in between puzzles disorienting (not in a good way). The path between puzzles is where the game exposes narration while shifting the scenery by having the walls and floor pulls/shift/move/break apart. Much of this got me to the edge of motion-sickness; I often had to look at a static part of the environment while moving forwards. The game also does not have any field of view options (that I could find) to try to make this better.

Very much enjoyed this game.

I'm not usually a fan of roguelike games, but this game has me on the edge of ~80hours of gameplay. There are 3 aspects to this game that kept me playing.

1. The combat is fun, varied and technically tricky. Each run allows you to pick a weapon and static bonus and presents you with choices of semi-random bonuses throughout the run. The weapons themselves have several "flavours" and can also be modified during a run which changes the way you play with it. The combination of these allows you to create a somewhat unique build per-run; the combinations have limits, but it really takes a while to get through them. The bosses and environments also vary, though here the variance is much more limited. Fighting through these variations and progressively getting further over multiple deaths really made me feel like I skilled up; getting better at this game felt quite rewarding.

2. The story mechanic. The story advances a little bit every time you die. Advancements in the story change the conversations you have both in fights and in places with downtime. That means that every run, you're almost guaranteed to hear something novel. The conversations are very well crafted. The different characters react to events that happen throughout the game and react to one another. The writers also put a fair bit of effort into making the elements of the world and story reference real Greek Mythology, but tweaked so as to be unique to this plot and this universe e.g. Zagreus, the protagonist, exists in the Greek mythos. Certain bits of lore that you could read on his wikipedia page are in the game, but are incorporated in contexts which are unique to the game. Really appreciated the level of detail there.

3. The game is time-flexible. Each run + chat with NPCs takes between 15 and 40 minutes. I found it quite easy to fit in a run or two in my day while taking a break, but I could also quite comfortably sit through ~3hours of runs without feeling like I was grinding.

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== A list of pros and cons ==

Pros:
- The music is great. If you've played other SuperGiant games, this one is on-par with the music quality of those.
- The sound design is great. Different elements have distinct sounds that you get used to hearing and which are relevant to the gameplay (e.g. different boons have distinct sounds, so do enemies and points of interest). The audio quality and spatial placement of effects just sounds really good.
- The characters: they're interesting; they're really well voice acted; I love them.
- Art style. I didn't once feel that something was out of place visually in this game. Some things are intentionally quirky, but I see that as a bonus.
- Humour. This hits my specific style of humour. Dialogue is wry, tongue-in-cheek and many elements are purposefully anachronistic in a way that told me that the game doesn't take itself too seriously. Some of their shenanigans had me laughing hard enough to end a run due to distraction.

Cons:
- It takes a looooooot of runs to finish the story. If you're a story-line completionist like me, you'll need to do 80+ runs to get to the epilogue. Multiply that by ~30mins per run and you'll have an idea of the time it takes to get closure in the story arcs.
- Only 3 (and a half) environments. You battle through 3 major landscapes and a minor one. There are a handful of other mini-areas, but it feels like the game needs more variety here.

Meh:
- It's a roguelike. If you're not a fan of seeing your character die repeatedly, you may not enjoy this. That said, I would still recommend you give it a shot; the story/characters may be good enough to compensate for this.
- NPC interactions are alternating static images. This is more an artistic style choice from SuperGiant games; they do it in their other games. It's strongly carried by the great voice-acting. Personally I quite like this style, but if you're playing in a language that has weak voice acting, this may be enough to kill the experience for you.