I love this game. I also kind of hate it. Which, to be fair, is about what I'd expect from something inspired by Source surf maps. There's a certain amount of sadism inherent to the concept, and I don't want to deter anyone who might be intrigued; there's a lot to like here, and what it does right, it does [i]amazingly[/i] right. It cribs from Source b-hopping but does its own thing, the presentation knocks it out of the park, the surreal, vaguely brutalist aesthetic and otherworldly sound design are all chef's kiss.
That said, for as locked-in as some of the moment-to-moment level design is and for how gritty it looks now with all the fancy added graphical effects, the overworld feels, to me, even more meandering in post-0.6 than what I remember of the most recent pre-0.6 demo. (RIP by the way, we gotta stop making these things time-limited, guys.) 0.6 in general is a little bit polarizing. The new "echolocation" ability serves somewhat as a crutch for the new overworld, if you can even intuit the alien symbols it shows you, but I think I generally preferred how the old one felt to navigate. It was more experimental, arguably about as intuitive, and much more concise. The new overworld feels like it's got much more empty space just to look more like an impressive upscale facility.
The Hole is cool, though. I mean, obviously it is. I love whatever goobers are leaving these bizarre audio logs. They're amazing.
Guns, health upgrades, and a lot of enemies were removed to focus more on movement, which I broadly think was well-chosen. This ain't Echo Point Nova, and trying to pinpoint lobbing grenade shots with projectile travel time while also b-hopping around at 80 MPH was just too much. An air dash was added at some point that caps your speed but works well as a recovery tool or quick close-quarters redirect. I like the air dash as a fallback, but the speed-sapping sand section that's been chosen to tutorialize it is kind of miserable to get through. Although, at one point that section existed WITHOUT the air dash as an assist, so it's an improvement on that, at least.
Then, for as much as I appreciate the mood conveyed by the bleak and gritty graphical filters on everything, they kind of objectively make certain parts of certain levels harder to navigate. There are times you'll be rubbing your face up against a wall and you can't even tell, and at one point the inky-black floor tiles I was on gave way to a bottomless pit that was signified by nothing more than a white line and an absence of the very subtle glossy floor sheen that isn't even visible from most angles. I miss when I could actually see stuff better.
I'm now prompted in many, MANY places by the game to, quote, "Avoid making noise and hide if necessary." This was not originally a prompt and it has seemingly only on a single occasion accompanied an acutal threat that isn't an immobile turret, and even then, didn't seem particularly applicable. I also laughed out loud when the "Avoid making noise" prompt was interrupted by the [spoiler]"Press F to Scream"[/spoiler] prompt. Make up your freaking mind, game. Better yet, stop telling me to be quiet and hide. Neither does anything.
Finally, the update notes state, "Added ending." And if that [i]is[/i] the ending, it caps things off in the most nebulous possible way by making the whole game feel like a prologue to something, followed by a "that's all for now, folks" popup stating the game still isn't finished.
I... have no idea how to feel about this game as a whole. There are amazingly satisfying moments and it does a tremendous job of being nebulous, alien, and artsy, but in its insistence to lean into those trappings it ends up sacrificing things like basic communication and readability in certain instances (and, arguably, an ending that's something more than a nothingburger). Then, when the overworld gets overhauled to look more like an actual facility and less like an experimental hodgepodge of rooms and corridors, I don't like it as much. This isn't even getting into the matter of secret levels like The Hallway and what comes beyond, wherein I literally can't figure out what the game wants of me, and it's apparently [i]such[/i] a niche production that no footage exists online of other people completing those segments. It's like being back in the pre-GameFAQs days again.
Again, I'd probably recommend it, it's unique and deserves to be seen and experienced, but it's also a fascinating example of the whiplash of game dev. I'd probably pay a couple bucks extra just for a collection of previous major iterations to peruse without having to reference SteamDB and use the Depot Downloader. But for now it gets a downvote just to highlight that there are some mixed feelings about the current state of things. I'd say truly extraordinary things could be created if a level editor were ever released for this, but the community is so niche that I feel like about 3 people would ever make anything with it.
