Tales of Kenzera: Zau

The whole pitch about this game being about processing grief wasn't what attracted me to this game, and the story did absolutely nothing for me. If anything, there's too much dialogue in it. What attracted me was that it looked like a cool Metroidvania, and it is. It has some roughness to it. There's ground slam attack that looks really useful, but I could rarely pull it off. The delay in triggering the glider ability is really frustrating during platforming sections where I have to trigger it right before hitting the spikes below. There are some bugs I ran into like getting stuck aiming state, getting stuck against a wall, and my button inputs were non-responsive a few times. There were a couple of times I was pinned down by enemies an unable to do anything until they finally killed me. Hopefully, all of this is tweaked and fixed in a patch. Movement and combat feels good and satisfying though, so I was enjoying most of my time playing. It feels pretty Metroidvania-light as it's a mostly linear experience. Not much backtracking to older areas. The map doesn't even show blocked paths you couldn't open yet, and it didn't really need to. I think I only used fast travel twice the entire game. As for abilities, there's nothing new here I haven't seen done in other Metroidvanias. And in a couple of cases, I've seen it done much better.