Recent reviews by ClayTheBot

Scenery that looks like obstacles or platforms kept fooling me and getting me killed.
The story made me roll my eyes more than once.
I had very little precision control with the analog sticks on the steamdeck.
Some mechanics are not explained until you get to the B-side levels, meaning you can easily miss out on this and not understand why you seemingly randomly get flung into spikes with more velocity.
Inertia sometimes does and does not apply in an unintuitive way when working with moving blocks.

The levels impressed me with easy ramp-up in difficulty and new mechanics are introduced organically through play far more often than not.
The scenery is beautiful.
The music is good.

Worth every penny. Do yourself a favor and go into it blind. The sense of discovery, wonder, and mystery are such precious aspects to the feeling of this game.
Don't let the reviews invoking the name of Dark Souls fool you. The combat is not easy but it is not difficult either. The game is generous with its usable items to get an advantage in a difficult fight.
The puzzles are endless and the community to this day still have not solved everything, but progressing through the game does not require any complex analysis with crowd sourced talent. A single determined person can translate the language, gather all the trophies, and 100% the game in 30 hours.
I stopped following the game's development when they sent an email that Secret Legend would be released hopefully in two years. That was back in 2016. When I finally bought the game and saw that Lifeformed worked on the game's audio I got excited from my fond memories of the Dustforce soundtrack.
I recommend this game as highly as I can.

I expected this game to be something other than fun. I wasn't counting on frustration being its major characteristic. There are glaring problems with the gameplay here, and its thoughtful story and symbology can never make up for it in my eyes.

One portion exemplifies a problem at its worst as it presents you with a cliche choice. Do you take the shot? I chose not to shoot. The animations seem to repeat at first observation, leading me to believe that I can't wait them out and you can not sneak by without your teammates somehow taking this as a sign to shoot. You must wait a few agonizing minutes. This is not much of a problem alone, but it is RIGHT BEFORE a difficult battle. You must watch this in-game scene after every reset if you want to take the no-shoot choice. One can lower the difficulty to minimize this problem but the normal difficulty is easy enough to be called boring.

Your teammates will continually go forward into groups of enemies and fall, despite being given no orders to do anything so risky.

The controls are another point of contention as the player is fairly unresponsive and context sensitive controls frequently cause you to fumble out in the open while taking fire. The same button tied to melee is the button tied to vaulting over and behind cover. You will frequently find yourself flailing a gun at nothing when you intended to jump behind what appeared to be safety and dying as a result. Again, reducing the difficulty to normal would solve this, but you should never have your biggest enemy be the controls, AI, and scenes.