Maybe I’ve played a lot of games with similar puzzles – Bioshock and Marvel’s Spider-Man, to name two – but I found them a little too easy. Unlocking hacking abilities allows you affect enemies so they, for example, protect you from other enemies, as well as introducing circuitry puzzles to the game. These puzzles and the recompile mode that is used to both solve them and hack enemies seem incredibly intimidating when you first encounter them, but in practice usually involve you inverting one or two logic gates after tracing some pipes to find where. These upgrades are found throughout levels and can be missed easily in some cases, forcing you to backtrack through the Metroidvania world to find them, complete with all the fiddly platforming. These include a double/multi jump, and a dash ability. You later unlock abilities that make it quicker and a little more forgiving. You get used to finding where you’re going, and you can usually read the level design, mostly because they’re huge open areas made up of things you’re supposed to be doing. It feels cheap, though the punishment is to respawn with 10 health removed. The glitching visual effect can also be an issue as platforms and enemies are obscured as they’re obscured while still affecting your progress or ability to fight back.Īfter a while, it isn’t that bad. Then there’s platforms that have holes in the middle and others with broken glass panels that you can fall through. It looks very pretty from a distance, but jumping your way up lengthy sections of glass shards is difficult at the best of times without them being at odd angles that cause you to slide off the edge. Many platforms are both small and shaped like broken glass that’s been arranged in unusual ways. Whilst the platforming itself is accurate enough, the level design and aesthetic choices make it feeling quite the opposite. The message for that objective’s completion only appeared after I fell to my death and respawned after 15 minutes of aimless wandering. I completed two biomes with a similar, clear to understand structure, but a later area shifted to a hub and spoke layout that left me lost after completing one objective. Sometimes this is due to level design, other times it’s vague objectives. First of all, you often don’t know where to go. Unfortunately, the rest of the game isn’t quite as well realised, ironically partially due to the aesthetic design. Once I put on some headphones, I stopped in the middle of a looped wire and listening to the signal that was travelling around it as it sounded and felt like it was going around me, to the point where it gave me goosebumps. The sound combines with the visual design into one glorious whole. The same can be said of the sound design, whether it’s the occasionally jazzy, piano-focused background music or the buzzing, whirring, and sparking of machinery as you’re passing.

Recompile game