It's cool,

feels somehow less realized than its predecessors in the same series and certainly doesn't hold a candle to Dujannah.

Feels like jack wanted to further the design style he worked out on dujannah and the episodic avant garde writing style of The Stage.

Feelin the same vibes he's had since his very early days here, that crispy animation energy of Vessel.

I guess what I feel like this is missing is that feeling I got in the first three sluggish morss games, the feeling that the animation style, while exceedingly avant garde, was still very tonally coherent. The first game had stark pixel art to contrast the insane high-contrast crispy pngs, the second one leaned in on hand drawn multi-media stuff which again felt all super coherent, and the third one felt like the height of Jack's unique animation style that carried smoothly over into dujannah.

Similarly the writing in the first 3 games and the other titles previously mentioned all felt super connected, weird, but connected. You got the feeling jack had a clear idea of the world this stuff was set in, and the bizarre disconnected philosophical takes could be extremely weird, but by the end you could imagine why characters would be standing around babbling profundities.

Pattern circus has a lot more of The Stage's vibes, the avant garde philosophy and small moments of strange and deep VIBES with little connection to one another save for some small hints of tonally connected characters and places. It's done here with some small references to the previous games and even a moment that slightly clarified past events, but the main characters in this one don't even feel like characters, I could spend hours theorizing who Widok and fritnid really were and what they meant to their universe, in pattern circus I have no idea who anyone is or what they even want beyond one vague notion of a quest. Maybe I just missed the point here but it did not click for me.

finally we have the music, usually the single strongest point for jack and it's certainly not half bad in this one, but on the whole it felt like a bunch of neat tracks got made before the game was and then slapped in all haphazard. even the slightly out-of-place and crispy tracks from previous games had a strange sense of place in the whole of the experience, but here they just feel slapped on top of zones with no real thought to them.

it's by no means a bad game, if you're into this sort of thing Jack is a master at it, but sadly, for me, this just wasn't the brand new sluggish morss game I hoped for when I first saw it advertised.

I was expecting the level of polish he achieved on dujannah brought to the mysterious and darkly foreboding universe of sluggish morss, and in that regard, I'm left wanting.