I mentioned in my review that reviewing the game is kind of outside the scope of the review due to semantics. Everything that follows that is largely nonsense, up to my final thoughts.
Loneliness is such an interesting theme to explore in your review, and I feel like you touched on it with your initial reminiscing but then fell short. I felt like you had more to say and ended up with a stifled voice. I give it a 2/13.
I believe games should either be what we'll call 'cowboys' or 'firefighters.' All games that currently and will ever exist fall into one of these two categories and should be judged as such. Before I get into the review I think it should be clear about what these terms mean:
Cowboys: These are primarily games that contain, feature, or are developed by horses. This is not always the case, though. When this is not the case, we can think of these games as games that evoke the feeling of the great American West, manifest destiny, and imperialism. But also, freedom, elegance, money, gold, settlers, California, and mountains. These games are defined by their commitment to exploration and a steadfast belief in games as entertainment.
Firefighters: These are games that are 100% reactionary, reacting to current trends, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, people, places, or things. For example, every game that is made by AI automatically falls into this category. Every sequel and game with more than one character also has the potential to fall into this category.
Now that we've cleared that up, I know you're all thinking: "What about games that are politicians?!" Obviously, I have intentionally excluded the final third category of games up to this point in a narrative device known as 'burying the lead." You may also be thinking that this game is obviously a boat-type game. Unfortunately, the game is outside of the scope of this review due to semantics.
Due to the lack of genre examples, I've also excluded farmer games from this dichotomy.
In other words, this game is clearly interested in more than just the price of bread, and I have a lot of respect for that. To me, it's an obvious 8/10 for lack of a visible controller. But, I think I will increase it to a 9/10 because it's a game I could see people 1,000 years ago enjoying or people 150 years in the future loving, in other words, timeless! That also in my opinion, brings it down to a 7/10 because it's kinda pandering to such a massive audience trying to capture an audience like that.
That being said, my gut says that I should give it a solid 8/10.
This is great! I kinda wish the other arms had more broad uses instead of just being for specific gates/puzzles it would be cool of there were patches of grass around that the grass arm could stick to or blue platforms scattered around that you have to use the blue arm in conjunction with the brown one to climb. If this is in the game ignore this I couldn't make it up the hill outside of the cave before giving up to write this comment.
