I'd like to recommend this, and I'm close to doing so. The visuals and soundtrack are genuinely magnificent. That alone comes *so close* to deserving a recommendation... but everything else is pretty damn terrible, making it extremely hard to enjoy your time with the game.

The devs clearly took a very conscious choice that broad, wandering exploration should be core to the game - to the extent that they want you to regularly have no idea where you're supposed to go (or indeed, what you're supposed to do when you get there), within environments that are often vastly sprawling. I've rarely seen a game with such minimal, indistinct signposting (sometimes nothing at all) to nudge players in the right direction.

Given the quality of the aesthetics and audio, this approach to gameplay could actually be totally fine - if only navigating the environments wasn't such an awkward, frustrating, deeply unsatisfying grind.

Walking is agonisingly slow, especially considering the scale of the areas you are expected to cover and the utter lack of clarity about where you should go much of the time. Flying in wide open spaces feels fine, but you also often have to fly in confined areas, which is so clunky and graceless that it feels horrible. Both forms of movement are in general unforgivably janky, the character will regularly veer off in a random direction and you are constantly struggling to wrangle them back into going where you want.

Even when the game doesn't simply decide for itself what direction the character will move, the frustration is massively exacerbated by the fact that movement direction is relative to camera, and the camera is a rebellious, wildly flailing beast. One second, you are walking along with the camera floating behind you, then suddenly it whips round to a totally different angle, and just for fun goes under the ground, so you can't even see the hole your character has already stumbled into. But don't worry, you won't die - you just need to fly back to where you started, slowly shuffle your way back to the same point, and hope that this time the camera and movement controls will show just a hint of interest in what you are telling them to do.

It is honestly a little shocking to me that, considering time spent idling while AFK, I probably took in total about 3 hours to complete the game - and yet in such a short time, and despite really enjoying the awesome soundtrack, by the end I was so sick of fighting the camera and movement controls that I was feeling desperate to get it over with.

It's genuinely tragic that this game obviously had a lot of love put into it to come up with such wonderful music and visual style, and even if questionable, a very intentional gameplay style. And yet, it failed so abysmally to manage the basic fundamentals of allowing you to move and look around, to the extent that the game, though not quite unplayable, is virtually impossible to enjoy.

A textbook case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.