I was pleasantly surprised by the structure of the session, albeit the early signs of shallow waters for combat held true. All enemy varieties except the bats are sluggish enough to be dispatched before they can try even a single attack, and consequently that exception ends up as just a moving target. Pre-rendered cutscenes are a beautiful bygone delicacy; for some reason I found the enemies' annihilation to be exceptional shots. The Friedrich's "Wanderer" composition and the emotional ambiguity conveyed at the end was cheesy and captivating; in short, a lot of the game feels like an excuse to flex some graphics on a custom engine; whether or not I broadly agree with that pursuit these days, I can't deny it to be a beloved ambition of the medium, and here it nurtures a nostalgia that not many avenues are offering except for their primary sources.
The game is testing my endurance on attributing a "Land" mood to so many games; variability of locales and a small yet magical discovery of the path of rising islands; these are present but not yet fully activated through the design. I would suspect that Nerve games are so readily abundant in the catalogue due to the instructors and their rubric's ability to fall back on the establishment of basically every famous game prior to the colloquial inception as an art form (late 5th or early 6th gen in my humble opinion). On second thought, the attributes of Land game design seem to begin and end with the members and instructors who are responsible for the artistic rubric. Alright, alright, it's a Land game; kudos specifically to Ryan Davis, Trevin Dahl, Amy Kim, Josh Bechtol, Anoop Herur-Raman, Blake Johnson, and Sierra Keeser for making me screenshot the credits for this bit.
The 2-3d style lauded in a similar manner by Bastion is distinct from the style of Final Fantasy's posterboard environments, even though they operate identically. Perhaps the difference just centers my bias around the constituent elements; preferring a world map with movement and scale rather than static challenges, for example. Even though the second level wasn't as intricate as Midgar or Esthar City, it still had enough of a vibrant distinction from the previous area, whereas the pith tones of Bastion's first few levels reveal its age more than any other feature.