I observed a certain level of quality from the outside, as I'm sure many others did, and so I suppose my expectations were laid up to be lowered. The first playthrough was the expected A quality experience, but since it was explicitly offered I was also obliged to attempt speedruns. The interesting conundrum with requesting this particular motivation is quite literally asking your players to break your game apart. I wondered if the game would have any "melon skips;" clearly unintentional workarounds that bypass several game objectives. While it may strike me in the future to search for such a thing, I'm satisfied for this review to have found a way to collect "The Silo's Secret" star while also falling into the water, which allows me to utilize the time spent acquiring the star to also reload at any checkpoint that I touched last.
The game is a simple and clean Nerve-Land mazer without any narrative affronts, aside from audiovisual aesthetics which evoke a simple carefree oasis surrounded by the far-off markers of an oceanic industry. The Nerve elements are given enough polish and precision alongside the controls to properly stake their claim, and the Land elements are nicely balanced between "summit challenges" and "labyrinth challenges" to engage the Nerve elements even further.
The sort of "interpolating orthogonal" control that was used for Mario 3d Land & World isn't something I'm familiar with personally, but I think it has more right to feel right at home in a game without Mario-Luigi's 64 theses on the wall. I can imagine a case being made for the checkpoint cutscenes to be inversely conducive to a speedrun experience, such that using fewer of them will end up better for you in the long run. However, it still seems like a rippling problem that is solved with a simple omission and faith in the player to recognize the shortcuts if they need them. Sonic 3 & Knuckles, for example, would have ruined its pacing if the game stopped itself to direct your attention to special stages opening above the checkpoint; in any case, the problem also basically solves itself with infinite lives, making death the fastest track to returning to a checkpoint.