Short metroidvania? Yep: I got *an* ending in 7 hours completing the side-quests... and honestly, at this point in time, I'm not even sure if I want to do NewGame+ or the harder difficulty, or even get 100% completion of anything.

Look, this is basically Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, but the off-brand version. Feels nice to play, great art assets and music, cool combat mechanics. I remember way back when this game was still in development I was looking forward to playing it. It has its own *spin* on game mechanics that fit it well, pun intended. It has a really lame time-stop gimmick that, in practice, it's a platforming aid at best and you won't even need it otherwise, because the normal difficulty is, as others claim, too easy. No joke, there were like 2 bosses that I basically "face-tanked" and ignored everything it was doing and still won. If you want to play Order of Ecclesia but don't want to give N*ntendo money, this is the next best thing.

But here's where I go for the kill and not recommend the game. You know that meme joke, about Netflix adding homosexual characters for "flavour" or something to what would otherwise be a generally good thing? This is that meme turned into a game. After the plot unravels just the bare minimum to send you on your way, every character is basically homosexual or pansexual and they won't shut up about it. NOBODY CARES! It does NOT serve the plot! Having a reference or two? That would be fine, yeah. But this is not okie dokie when every single character becomes some kind of virtue-signaling vessel about the joys of having a harem of indiferent genders. Hell, at one point, I lost track of if the characters were supposed to be biologically male or female with all the shenannigans their mouths spewed, for almost all of the characters! Once again no joke, it's not like I have a problem with different gender orientations, but I genuinely started wondering mid-game if the plot had forgotten the whole "Timespinner" part of the title to tell us the message of our lords and saviours the time-travelling pansexuals that litterally abandon their previous family to shack up with their prefered partners and create another culture of harems...

And the worst part? It completely wastes the whole "changing the past has consequences" bit by basically not even letting you SEE ANY CHANGE IN THE "FUTURE" SECTIONS. You burnt a few things in the past and created passages in the future, whoopedy-doo! Like, only in 3 spots! The other changes are litterally changing time to stop 3 beams of plot-device-barrier from blocking your path! You forced a dictator not to destroy another planet, and then what? STILL NO PLANET IN THE FUTURE'S BACKGROUND, when it was implied that it was a neighbouring planet! I don't even know how to end this part of the review in a way that expresses how much of a wasted potential I see, even without going into Chrono Trigger levels of complexity!

Good game? Yes. TERRIBLE character development, where anything except gender orientations is super predictable. Not saying that it was a bad purchase, but this is the reason I'm beginning to think about going back to playing plain-old platformers and generic Doom-clones and shooters instead of anything with a plot, because as a writer I can't in good consciousness recommend a game that fails to deliver a reasonable plot development just to integrate ideologies when the initial setting was the actual draw.