Impeccable aesthetics and music. Controls are tight, fluid, and responsive. Combat is largely fairly simple (compared to, say, Hollow Knight), but enjoyable, with boss fights being more complicated and engaging. The game has like 20~25 mini/bosses over the course of a 6-9 hour playtime, so it's rather boss-dense (which is good, here). The Gears of Erebus boss is the only one I have real issues with, in that the only good strategy I can see for it is a cheese strat (and some checking on youtube shows everyone else doing the same, ugh). The final boss is a decent spike in difficulty from the rest: it took me 6 tries, mostly due to the third phase (which unfortunately has enough randomness that it sometimes forces you to take damage), while every other boss took 1-2 attempts.

There technically is a plot and setting, but the game is very light on details for both, it's mostly vibes-based.

Also, for some reason the Olympian Strike/Dive move (the dive-kick thing) is explained extremely poorly by the game, to the degree that the explanation is actively misleading you.

Impeccable aesthetics and music. Controls are tight, fluid, and responsive. Combat is largely fairly simple (compared to, say, Hollow Knight), but enjoyable, with boss fights being more complicated and engaging. The game has like 20~25 mini/bosses over the course of a 6-9 hour playtime, so it's rather boss-dense (which is good, here). The Gears of Erebus boss is the only one I have real issues with, in that the only [i]good[/i] strategy I can see for it is a cheese strat (and some checking on youtube shows everyone else doing the same, ugh). The final boss is a decent spike in difficulty from the rest: it took me 6 tries, mostly due to the third phase (which unfortunately has enough randomness that it sometimes [i]forces[/i] you to take damage), while every other boss took 1-2 attempts. There technically is a plot and setting, but the game is very light on details for both, it's mostly vibes-based. Also, for some reason the Olympian Strike/Dive move (the dive-kick thing) is explained extremely poorly by the game, to the degree that the explanation is actively misleading you.