Shadow Complex part 4: Now Lucius, now you don't
1Last stream, I unwittingly locked myself out of ever getting one item in the game. Unfortunately it was a unique upgrade; fortunately it didn't prevent me from finishing the game. What _did_ almost prevent me from finishing the game was some severe jank on the final boss' "hitbox" - which ends up being a microcosm of this entire game, really.
This is one game I'll certainly let myself off the hook for putting off for so long. I wanted to give it a fair chance, being a metroidvania, but it really tries its best to be as uninteresting and unrewarding as possible, to the point where I ultimately gave up on finding items and just wanted to get it over with. The basic movement mechanics constantly feel goofy - as an approximation, think of the exact opposite of the almost-too-sticky mechanics of Dead Cells. Exploration is almost never rewarded with anything interesting; 99% of the time, when you bust open a barrier with your newest weapon, what you find behind it is nothing but a tiny pocket with an ammo upgrade for that same exact weapon. Enemy AI is hilariously nonexistent. The walkers which require a late-game upgrade seem to be near-impossible to dismantle to make them vulnerable, requiring dozens of attempts, and this apparently also applies to the final hit on the last "boss" of the game, which is mysteriously nit-picky given that the thing you're targeting is, at least visually, the size of several barns.
And then there's the plot, or lack thereof. There's barely any character development, especially with regard to the main villain, who (if you play the game correctly, unlike me) you only meet face-to-face at the last minute before the final battle. Then when I finally landed the final hit, what was presumably intended to be a major plot twist felt completely hollow, because the writing gave me zero reason to care, and the absolute slog I endured had already rendered me numb.