Kirk Hamilton

And then eventually you get...

Items that let you take shortcuts, Metroidvania style, like you can knock down obstacles in the New York area.

You get this one thing that lets you cut through these big tentacle things that are in your way.

And it all works really nicely.

And it also gives you pretty straightforward goals, very clear goals for each area.

Hey, go find five unlock things.

thing find find locks to unlock find two elevator areas to explore do go this way like go pick pick between a and b um of these encounters and then at the end of it you'll you'll reach and unlock and then you'll have to do that three times and then you'll beat the level it's all very regimented and structured in a way that i think works really nicely for a game like this

Yeah, there's a good level of challenge throughout the game, which I also really appreciate.

And you do have to think on your feet a lot.

In the hacking mechanic, you get these yellow nodes that can do extra damage or...

have other effects like one of them um allows your hack to uh to apply to multiple enemies that are on the screen but you only have a limited number of them and while you can replenish them throughout the level you still you use them up every time you use them so sometimes you have to kind of think on your feet and be like oh do i really want to use one of these yellow nudes do i want to avoid that while i'm doing the hacking minigame oh no i accidentally hit one of those do i want to keep

going or make a split second decision to go back and potentially get hurt but also like don't want to waste it and so there's really fun kind of rotation of that stuff um yeah i haven't seen enough of the story to be able to comment substantially on on that other than i thought it was it was a fun little moment when you was like you know i was an orphan and uh he almost straight up says and therefore i relate to you being an orphan and now you're going to be my orphan but a nice

This bit of adopted kid visibility.

It's a fun little moment.

But I do think it signals, the game signals pretty clearly at the beginning of the game when they just move on from all of his friends dying.

It signals pretty clearly that this is not a game you play for a big emotional wallop of a story.

I wonder if that was a vestige from a previous iteration of this game because it's worth noting, we didn't talk about this earlier, but this game was announced in June of 2020.

When this game was announced, just to put this in perspective, this game was announced when the PlayStation 5 was announced.

and they said it was coming in 22 yeah yeah 2022 this game was announced uh about a month after we started triple click this game was announced um uh this game was announced in the same stream that uh that like spider-man miles morales was announced again just putting things in perspective for you guys so yeah i mean that was uh

That was a very long time ago.