Recently Completed: Recompile (Xbox Series X)
This is a 3rd-person Metroidvania set inside a badly damaged computer system. Think Hollow Knight meets Tron, and you're in the neighbourhood. You play as a piece of injected code on a mission to repair the various areas of the computer, while finding upgrades, and recovering text-based logfiles that explain what happened to the original system owners.
For my thoughts this time I want to try something I learned a long time ago: assigning Stars for the things you like, and Wishes for things you wish were different.
Lovely aesthetic, sounds, and soundtrack.
The ASCII menus and animations are awesome, and completely sell the "hackery" vibe.
The story logfiles are well-written and it's genuinely interesting to discover the fate of the system administrators.
From the first area onward, platforming is fiddly and I missed many, many jumps, or just slid off the side of something. The game doesn't help by being quite hazy and/or dark in places.
You're often forced to fight on extremely small ledges as well, and will probably just slip off before the enemies get you.
I felt pretty bad at combat so the optional "slow-mo" upgrade, that slows the game world to a crawl, was a godsend. I used it everywhere.
The map looks cool but isn't terribly helpful; at least it could remove icons for upgrades you've already found, which it does not do.
This is sort of a big one, but the game is widely noted for giving very little overt instruction to the player. That doesn't have to be a bad thing! Unfortunately, I made it to the end of the game with various sections of the computer in different states of "repair" (there are meters that show progress) but I actually have no idea what I did other than explore them.
There are even different endings based on your repair levels! But what do you even do to change that? I don't know!!
Anyway, this game is good and worth playing if you like the Metroidvania genre or Tronish things. Just get ready to take a few Frustration Breaks ;)