Given Hempuli's fame as an experimental game developer, I expected some experimental stuff, but I would say this is a rather typical metroidvania.

The two atypical things I have noticed were that the player character was smaller than usual, and while typically in metroidvanias the world opens up as you get new abilities, here, it sometimes closes: after you activate some systems, some of the pathways become closed for the rest of the game.

The story feels very lackluster for a metroidvania, we did not care about it at all, and we did not want to go for better victories.

The platforming and bosses were fun, although sometimes it felt needlessly difficult. The hookshot is annoying at first: you need to shoot it very precisely to move where you want, and sometimes you have to do several times in a quick succession. It is sometimes satisfying when you pull out a difficult hookshot maneuver, but more commonly, it is annoying.

So -- a solid game, although a bit below my expectations.

This game starts off as an innocent metroidvania. However, it quickly makes it's clear it is going to be brutal. It punishes you for everything, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The movement is smooth and fairly precise, the graphics of course dated but they do have a charm and style that works for it. At first, it feels fun and engaging to explore and bosses feel fair with patterns that are not too difficult to distinguish. It doesn't hold your hand at all, outside of a few terminals that explain a few mechanics inexplicably ahead of the time you get them. I found myself wandering a lot and backtracking a lot, which generally wouldn't be an issue except... As you progress the exploration becomes punishing. The game demands that you be careful and methodical with a limited health pool (I played on normal, easy just gives you a larger health pool). Enemies become incessant in chasing you down and chip away at you and platforming suddenly demands being precise.

However, about 2-3 bosses in, as the map starts to open up to you further, you start getting lost. You run into an area where you take damage constantly from being there. You assume you are missing an item to protect you, so you backtrack and go another direction, half way across the map you hit a dead end with a terminal that says basically "oh yeah you should just go through the fire area and ♥♥♥♥ it up on damage".

After a while, I hit a first major wall. Fifth boss (serpent 5) is extremely punishing, with a mechanic that is seemingly completely random and kills you very quickly. The boss normally flies around you but randomly it will decide to hug you and it will plaster to you, ticking damage until you die. There is no way to escape it once it does this and it is completely random when it does. This is made worse by the fact that you have to repeat the first phase over and over because of this unfair mechanic until the RNG gods smile on you. It is baffling and rage inducing.

But then the game also has no save points after bosses (let alone autosave) so if you barely squeeze by as is the most likely to happen, you are left extremely weak and likely to die before you reach the next save point (which feel sparse already). This is exacerbated by cheaply placed hazards after the boss that are there to trip you up and add more risk. In some cases they are placed in front of the boss just to annoy you.

Hookshot mechanic for navigation feels weird and I couldn't really get used to it. I would constantly miss with it, or it would be just out of reach and you'd plummet into acid or few screens down. This makes exploration painful instead of fun, like walking on needles. If you make a wrong choice on where to go, you will likely end up at the dead end and force to loop around in a very tedious fashion, provided you don't die outright. Speaking of tedious, so many paths are hidden behind tiles that you have to shoot to open up. So you will be going around guns blazing trying to find a tile that will open up.

But then I got to the jungle, where the background blends in with the foreground and I couldn't even tell which branches I can stand on and which ones I couldn't. And then the game even rubs it in your face that "some branches are *clearly* visible to be different". I laughed bitterly. The boss there is whole another bundle of bull, but I won't go into it, or it's 3 phases.

So to sum up, this game punishes you for: failing to execute finicky traversal right, failing to choose the right path, failing to backtrack after a boss, choosing to proceed after a boss instead of backtracking to a save point etc. It is a miserable experience for me. But I could forgive it all in the name of the challenge. But when the game artificaly throws random unavoidable BS from bosses for difficulty sake, that's where I draw the line.

You have generally 14-18 health on normal in the early game. Damage ticks are between 1-3. I edited the save file to have 88 instead of 18 just to see if the game would feel better. It does of course, but after defeating 6th boss I foolishly wanted to continue exploring. I depleted my whole health pool trying to find a save point. I couldn't. It undid everything including the boss I fought when I died.

No thank you. I cannot recommend this even to lovers of metroidvanias, which I consider myself. Pitty.

This game is 10 years old now, and it's still every bit as awesome as it was then. Given all of the other MV games that have come out since then (like, for example, Hollow Knight), it's really nice to play this again. The first time I played it, it was on a Mac, and there were issues with connecting to Steam so it didn't register any time; I had a playtime of 7 minutes on Steam despite spending, well, a lot more than that at the game. But that was back in 2015 or 2016, almost 10 years ago. Now, there are achievements (which the vast majority of players don't have because they played before achievements were introduced to ESA) and Steam properly tracks my game time. But yeah, it's great.

Now, this is a game that does not hold your hand. It's real tough. Until the endgame, there's mostly one place at a time that you should be exploring to make progress, which some people might dislike in an MV, but it never feels like you're on rails. Stylistically, this game is like Metroid Fusion crossed with Metroid Zero Mission, but it was made by Arvi Teikari (who later created Baba Is You) so you know it goes much, much deeper than that. You're exploring a space station with different habitats, a la Metroid Fusion, and the space station is afflicted with a computer virus (you learn about this pretty early on), a la Metroid Fusion, but the game is self-guided like Zero Mission and contains an ancient Chozo temple like Zero Mission. OK, it's not actually Chozo. Actually, it's really not actually Chozo. You'll see. But the game is actively hostile to you, and stuff is hidden everywhere such that you're probably not just going to find everything. Boss battles are very tough; you don't have anywhere near enough health to tank hits and you have to actually learn to avoid each attack while dealing damage, which makes a real but fair challenge. I really respect that in a game. ESA also uses the "old" style of saving, where you actually lose all progress since your last save when you die (y'know, normal saving), so you always have to worry about getting back to a save when you do something. Some people are annoyed by this. I think those people are too coddled in their modern conveniences. This is how games were meant to be saved!

One possible ding, maybe, is that I don't have a solid mental map of the entire station living in my brain for the last 10 years. What does that say about the locales of the game? But they are actually pretty memorable, and I've definitely had specific bits of the map etched in my mind. I think playing the game again will make me remember the map well until I play it again in 2035. Not remembering the map well, or really any of the (very nice) music, is partly why I decided to play this again. I was thinking, huh, I enjoyed this way back when, but I don't remember it very well. And I still don't; I'm not constantly remembering puzzle solutions or anything like that. The game feels reasonably fresh!

But something happens when you beat the game. And that something is... one hell of a postgame, let me tell you. I haven't gotten to it yet this time around, but that's something I do remember from last time. It gets extremely cryptic, with some really interesting challenges (I couldn't finish them then, but we'll see about now). Interestingly, I think those challenges were post-release additions to the game. The dev realized that La-Mulana exists and adopted some of the craziness from that game. That's another reason why I'm replaying this. If the thought of extremely cryptic puzzles and finding crazy things excites you, this game is definitely, definitely for you.

This game is often compared to Axiom Verge, also from 2015 and also largely Metroid-inspired. I think that's a pretty sensible comparison, especially since Axiom Verge also has its share of really cryptic stuff; that game has kind of two parts, the game itself and the cryptic stuff that you almost definitely need a guide for and that might help you in the final battle but isn't particularly interesting to get or do. Lots of hidden lore, not much reason to go digging through it. But ESA has a much more naturally cryptic post-game, and while I definitely used a guide back then to cut down on the effort, it's actually fairly doable. Another game that you could compare ESA to is Animal Well, which is generally conceived of as an onion with several layers of game. You have the actual standard game, but then things open and there are more secrets to find and puzzles to solve. ESA does this, though not as much as Animal Well. But you know, Arvi Teikari has been working on ESA2 for the last decade or so (with some big detours for, say, Baba Is You, which got pretty popular if you remember). If that's ever actually finished, I'm sure there will be lessons from all of his other successes and other puzzly MV games that have come out since then, like Animal Well.

Anyway, if you haven't yet, play this. If your introduction to MVs was Hollow Knight and you missed out on what existed at the time, ESA is yet untainted by the Radiance of Hallownest. If you enjoy rock hard platforming, combat, and puzzles and you want to be confused and hated by the game, play this. It might not be for everybody, but if it's for you, it's REALLY for you. ESA is one of my favorite MVs of all time. Play it!