[archived from a cohost post, originally made on march 11, 2024]
digging through this game was fascinating but not particularly enjoyable for me to actually play. it feels a lot like playing older platformers, but with nicer checkpointing and no lives system, just a slow circling of the drain for your collected gold that you can, in theory, always recover
how this played out for someone like me, who gets annoyed when I've lost some money, even if I'm in the final rush and have decided I don't care about retaining my riches, is that I simply frustrated myself trying to avoid the spiral's outcome and trapped myself in the spiral by doing so instead of moving on and making progress.
I would rather have a lives system! or, if I was playing an actual old game on an emulator, save states so I could just. not worry about my largely unimportant number going down and just play the game instead!
anyway I think I'll probably have more fun with old megaman games when I get to them because I'll have those instead of this stopgap stuff that lets me really fuck up my experience by just trying to scrape by and injuring myself in the process. just let me fall, quick and clean.