the induction was very cool. i've never had one even remotely work on me, alas, but i do enjoy listening to them. it's like asmr turned up to 11
i love the very simple concept and the metaphor for Your Mind and the absolutely trivial controls, and i was 100% ready to play some chill arcade game. hoo boy are the default settings intense though. the pain sigil inflicts psychic damage even without the triggers installed, and there are just so many red squares. after the extremely low-pressure "here is 1 shape" of the introduction, that caught me completely off guard, haha. and even the trance sigil has the side effect of covering the screen for precious seconds, increasing the risk of getting more pain sigils, so i ended up with the counterintuitive feeling that the best way to play is to dodge everything? let's not think too hard about what that implies about me within the metaphor of this game
had a much better time on easy! i'd thought the combo meter was broken but no it turns out i am just terrible. it definitely becomes much chiller.
tbh i'm kind of scared to try anything harder. and neither here nor there, but this seems like the kind of game where cranking up the difficulty is actually really hard to do fairly; even on medium i sometimes saw a triangle and square overlapping, making it effectively impossible to keep a combo. using a bluetooth keyboard at the edge of its range probably didn't help either, though this game is begging for precision and i suspect an analog joystick would've been a better idea (is that supported?)
also it's very pretty. if it had a third mode where the game plays itself and deftly dodges all the shapes, i feel like i could've stared at this for hours. hours and hours. just stared, blankly, so blank
overall rating: 🌀/10