I woke up after a series of surreal dreams in order to start my new morning routine, and immediately this may have resulted in a preconceived intransigence despite lots of easy appeals for me such as voice acting. The bug with the divergence tutorial was by all means a confirmation of my bias, but several things pointed toward a design that was dissatisfied: several paths loop back around to previous areas, some of them without drawn collision causing me to get stuck in the silo of darkness. The pace of the weapon and damaging enemies feels sophisticated but not refined, as several inputs get randomly eaten and I find more peculiar tricks to make it bearable such as tap-firing at the top of the overheat for a faster rate of fire, or breaking the balls' limbs to expose weak points.
The game would be a sufficient single-Land enterprise if its explicit directives were focused to that end, rather than a single broken doorway setpiece coated in combat with a lot of sauce but lacking a core texture. The hoplite figures, taken together with everything feel like a promise unfulfilled; when a pipeline is built for something as enterprising as VA, it'd do well to exhaust its capacity, even in moments where it would cut into the "worldliness." Admittedly I've experienced similar awakenings in my own projects as well; see those "reviews" for those thoughts.
Braid et. al. exemplify the condition of design exhaustion, which is thorough but presents somewhat of a challenge for cultural cache and the overall retention of interest over time. Its uncle-in-satire is arguably made more interesting by the degrees to which he has not been thorough, as the best game to play and the best game to remember are surely distinct.