Kirk Hamilton

But it doesn't grab me nearly as much at the beginning.

I like this structure in general as a video game.

Yeah, and also it has a kind of a Metroidvania feeling too because this also happened in Returnal, but it's structured differently in this game where, you know, the first thing you unlock after beating that first boss is the ability to jump off of these pads.

So when you're going through the first area, you'll see these latch points and it's like, okay, well, I'm going to get a grappling hook that will pull me up there.

Or you'll see a thing on the ground beneath a jump that you can't reach.

And it's like, OK, well, clearly at some point I'm going to be able to trampoline off of that.

So once you start to get that, there's a reason to go back to the earlier worlds.

You get more story.

You find more audio logs.

But also you get more upgrades.

And you can kind of unlock more stuff.

So you do have an incentive to go back.

But then also you can just push forward, like you were saying, Jason.

And then once you've unlocked the boss room, you can explore as much as you want to upgrade.

kind of a risk because you might lose some health but you're probably going to get more powerful and then you can just go straight to the boss and fight them whenever you want and like that kind of more empowering and slightly more like player friendly video game structure is is definitely a point in this game's favor i mean i'm sure the two of you remember listeners might not remember a big thing with returnal when it launched was that you couldn't stop playing in the middle of a run yeah i was gonna bring you just have to restart that was a huge issue

Freaking long.

My finishing, I remember being like, I don't know, an hour in or something and just being like, oh man, you know, up to the final boss or whatever and just kind of couldn't stop playing.

And of course, people have all kinds of reasons that they need to stop playing games.

This was a huge problem.

Yeah.