The title tells you pretty much what to expect lol. Metro Gravity takes Pseudoregalia's approach to adapting metroidvania elements to three dimensions as a starting point but takes those foundational ideas in a whole different direction, with slower paced exploration based around exploring every wall and surface in every room looking for new paths and secrets paired with difficult puzzles, which is occasionally broken up by rhythm-like combat sections. I enjoyed playing this game for the most part but there were a lot of things that felt frustrating about it. Exploration in a world where you can walk on any surface seems like it would be hard to pull off but it's actually done very well in Metro Gravity. Rooms are designed in such a way that there are no primary surfaces and a lot of pathways branching out in all directions, with the map being very interconnected. Impressively enough the map is also fairly easy to interpret despite the world having no up or down. Most of your movement abilities are given to you early on as well so you have plenty of time to master them and explore where you wish. Unfortunately the game's movement always has a halting feel to it even after you've unlocked every ability, as there are few abilities that let you move really fast and those that do tend to only work in specific areas or tend to end up in you running into obstacles and sticking to them, having your whole camera shaken in the process. The game's structure itself starts out fairly linear until reaching the first boss after which you have the abilities to explore largely at your own leisure. The areas you explore are visually diverse, with Red Desert and Gambler's Palace being standouts, and are packed with collectibles; in my own playthrough, I think I found less than half of them. The areas tend to all follow the same trend though of having a central hub with beams of light/chains/whatever leading out to X number of hands/torches/weird rocks that you have to destroy/activate/light to open a door or whatever in the main hub. This meant that whenever I was frustrated or annoyed with a puzzle or wanted to explore something new, all the other areas available to me had largely more of the same to offer which was disappointing. Enemies all have interesting designs, but there isn't any benefit to fighting them and whenever you pass one, the camera locks onto it and forces you to go towards it (and when you manually remove your camera from it, it often locks on AGAIN, or to the enemy's neighbor) which is super frustrating to deal with while passing through old areas. I didn't enjoy the puzzles much. While they tend to involve interesting uses of the gravity mechanic in moving cubes or other objects around, most of them share the same problem in which the solution to a puzzle is obvious but hard to actually pull off because you're fighting the controls or camera the whole way. There are SO many puzzles in this game where you have to manipulate the gravity of a cube multiple times in mid air to make it land on a VERY precise spot, having to start over if it diverges even slightly; or spend a minute setting up the puzzle environment to open a second-long interval to get whatever's locked behind the puzzle; or, worst of all, puzzles where you have to manipulate one object to clear the path for another, but the game's camera only lets you look at ONE of these objects at a given time so you are basically in the dark. Well at least they ended. The boss fights are probably the greatest spectacle in the game but the hardest parts as well. They are basically rhythm sections where you have to parry each of the boss's attacks to the beat, or based on the indicator superimposed on the boss, until they tire out. Attacking is optional and there are only rare movement-based challenges that break up this rhythm. While the music and visuals were interesting, the attacks from the boss don't correlate well with the music and the visual indicators are rather weak, especially when the boss is attacking a lot at once, so beating a boss fight can feel like a process of trial and error memorizing the attack patterns exactly as they occur - in a typical rhythm game you'd be able to see the notes yet to come but you get no advance notice in Metro Gravity so changes in a boss's attack patterns often come by surprise, or with a green indicator which doesn't give a whole much information. In general, there is a sense in Metro Gravity that the rhythm elements and the actual gravity elements are two separate things - they tend to occur independently of each other in-game and involve separate skillsets, and nearly all of your progression goes towards the latter. It would be interesting if these elements were integrated more closely. My favorite part of Metro Gravity's visual style is the vibrant colors everywhere - each area has its own signature color scheme and it's cool to see them blend into the blackness of space that surrounds the map. There isn't a strong underlying theme to any of the character or enemy designs; they seem like whatever the developer thought was cool, and they are cool to be fair. The story is similarly all over the place in terms of mood and is a bit complicated. The characters are all interesting though even if you don't spend much time with any of them. One gripe I had with the game's art direction is that the animations on the whole feel very stiff, as though the characters were all action figures. Enemies' attacks seem limp, which has the effect of making them harder to read and react to, as well as reducing the drama of boss fights and the sense of motion while exploring. In retrospect it's amazing to think that a game like Metro Gravity blending so many seeming discordant elements and ideas can turn out working as well as it does, and in light of that boldness it's easy to forgive a lot of the flaws present. Metro Gravity is fresh, inventive, and just plain different from other games and I feel there's a lot of value in playing a game like this that reminds you how cool the idea of walking on walls is and how cool it is to be able to do that in a video game, and that we can even do things like that in video games.