I have fulfilled my masochistic needs in this game. Fully recommend it for those with low self esteem and crippling depression.

This game gave me pure agony I truly deserve.

The game is extremely vague and does not explain much of anything, has frustrating controls and mechanics, punishes you for doing normal video game actions and often doesn't even tell you that it has done so, has obnoxious level design for no reason, has several RNG variables that can result in deaths that are completely out of your control, and has a mediocre reward at best for managing to struggle through it all. It's really not worth most peoples' time and I think the abnormally low game completion percentages support this.

I played all the way to the end, hoping to find the mythical reason for why people enjoy this game so much and why it has such highly positive reviews. I hated the entire experience. The fan base of this game is terrified of spoiling ANYTHING, so all guides and tips are either useless or vague as all hell. Because of this, I thought there must be something really cool and eye opening at some point that makes the frustration and lack of clarity worthwhile. About halfway through, I found what I think might be that point, and it really isn't all that profound. The ending isn't much better either.

While I am typically a fan of the "show don't tell" philosophy, I found it to be a hindrance here. There are several key aspects that the game does not explain and are virtually impossible to discern on your own, which are also vital to making progress. Some of them are also just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in design. I don't believe core game mechanics necessary for gameplay are a "spoiler" as so many others seem to believe, but out of respect for the community I'll give a warning and censor those comments:

1. All random NPCs roaming around the world have a hidden reputation variable. Things that eat you default to having a negative reputation, things that don't will have a neutral reputation. This means you can make allies or enemies. The problem with this is two fold:

- It is completely hidden and never explained to the player, and the rate at which you can change that variable is slow enough that you won't notice it unless purely by accident.

- If you play "normally" aka try to defend yourself from predators and survive, you will unintentionally make those predators MORE AGGRESSIVE and make the game harder as a result. They get mad when you hit them, which tanks the reputation score, which then chains to all other NPCs of the same species and makes your life a living hell.

2. The overseer, aka the thing that tells you where to go to progress the story, is incredibly vague. It took me a good few hours of running around and then looking it up on the wiki before I understood why it sometimes does or doesn't pop up and what its different symbols mean. In different regions of the game, it will try to give you different directions, which can often conflict with each other and have it pointing the opposite of where it was pointing in the last room.

3. Enemy AI is supposedly capable of learning and adapting to player actions. The lizards have learned that if they sit on the end of a pipe on another screen, where I can't see them, then they can eat me the moment I pop out. There are at least 4 occasions in which my progress was completely halted because the way forward was blocked by an enemy that would sit there and wait for me, and the only solution was to die over and over until the spawn RNG decided to put them somewhere else.

4. Oh yeah, spawn RNG. Sometimes, the only way I made any progress was because on the first attempt to get through an area it just didn't spawn anything. Other times, I would die to a poorly placed enemy three or four times before they just didn't spawn once and it became a cake walk. This is also never communicated to you why or how any of this works.

It frequently feels as if the game was made in a bad way intentionally. Objects placed in obnoxious spots that cause you to run into them and slow down. Certain resources being denied at key points just to slow you down and make you do something over and over again. Save spots put in places where you can't turn back from. The map having three "layers" to it making it 3-dimensional instead of a more understandable 2-dimensional layout. The fast travel system is locked to completing achievements, and for each achievement you complete you get only ONE use of the fast travel.

Accidentally press the throw button instead of pick-up button? Congratulations, your progress through this zone is now prevented by aggressive NPCs. Forget an item you need? It's 10 screens back, good luck buddy. Manage to successfully kill an enemy? It's now replaced with an EVEN HARDER ENEMY! YAAAAAAAAAAY! You can't go back to old saves, so all mistakes are permanent too.

Even exploration just adds confusion to the map and wastes time rather than providing you with anything. There are no items, shortcuts, hidden safe spots, bonus NPCs, or anything of the like. Just roundabout alternative pathways that loop back to where they started, or dead ends.

The movement is just bad. You can stand or crawl, and they are treated like "stances" where you can switch between them with up or down. Far too often I'm trying to move fast but downwards and end up crawling, or move slowly but upwards and end up standing. Entering pipes the wrong way dorks everything up and slows you down. Wall jumping conflicts with climbing over a ledge, and many of the vertical walls you can climb over are just the right height to make you jump off of them several times before it finally works and climbs over.

While the foreground and background art is beautiful, it very frequently is overly-busy and conflicts with the interactable game world. I have died COUNTLESS times from trying to get right on the edge of a cliff to make a jump (because for some reason we have to make all of those gaps pixel-perfect), only to slip and fall because the scraggly piece of metal there is just art, not something you can stand on.

The world and story are interesting, I'll admit, but not as much as everyone makes them out to be. There is a specific point about halfway through that caught me off guard and was cool, but it was short lived and immediately followed by more frustration with level design. Things are also once again incredibly vague and not communicated. I had to look up most story elements and explanations on the wiki because the only way to get that information in game is by collecting all of the colored pearls around the world and giving them to a specific NPC on the far edge. I honestly recommend just watching a playthrough on youtube or something to see the moderately interesting bits without having to bash your skull against a wall.

It's a bit like Outer Wilds if it told you nothing about the precursors, had zero dialogue, explained none of the game mechanics, was incredibly frustrating to play, required you to look everything up on the wiki, and was only mildly interesting lore-wise instead of mind blowing. I genuinely got that same feeling of mystery but much much weaker and with constant negative experiences holding everything back. I often love pushing through difficult games to get to the sweet reward, but this one is artificial difficulty from bad design and there isn't any reward for it.

If you go to the subreddit for this game you'll see a bunch of furries drawing the characters as well as each others' OC, and no discussion about the game despite a recent update. I think that should explain well enough where most of the positive reviews come from.

this game is so hard it makes me hard