This game is amazing. I don’t necessarily mean amazingly good, but I’m not at all trying to say it’s bad either. Look-
There is just an incredible amount of stuff just constantly happening in this game and I can’t follow any of it and it feels great. Utterly baffling cutscenes featuring some of the most ludicrous technobabble spouted as though it were common sense, psychic messages from ghostly apparitions of a man’s eyes, telekinetic children throwing fragments of battleships around, a playable character who screams “NOOOO!!!!!!!” every time she as much as gets a papercut, an annoying mascot character who is apparently super important to the plot, a lead character who suddenly becomes a giant antagonist, and all of this in about 30 minutes punctuated only by explosions and boss fights.
Treasure, one of my favourite developers of all time, who as far as I can tell have never made a single mis-step, somehow created this absolute fever dream of an on-rails shooter. All the usual Treasure hallmarks are here and yet it also feels utterly alien, like they just took every single idea they had and put them all together at once; the controls are ludicrously complicated and yet somehow seem to work, much like learning to pilot the helicopter in GTA Vice City, the plot throws itself around like a luchador who doesn’t have time for things like worldbuilding or establishing shots, the sheer audiovisual clutter never ever ceases, except to show you the next war machine you have to explode.
I haven’t got a clue what I did for the hour I played this game, but I came away from it a changed- nay, improved– person. I was a giggling mess by the end, long giving up on any hope of comprehension.
Fin or Bin:
Are you serious? Of course I want more. I feel like I touched the heart of madness and it changed me in ways irrevocable. It felt great to just switch off and let Sin And Punishment take me wherever it is we were going, and it’s a journey I long to Finish. Treasure always know what they’re doing, even when it’s beyond the ken of us normal folk; I trust them to get me where I need to be.
(Available on Nintendo 64 Online Expansion thing whatever it’s called)