Recompile is a metroidvania (well, kind of) game in which you play as a digital being of light exploring and traversing a virtual world of code. Your task is to make your way through the barely functioning internals of a computer system and the AI that controlled it, repair what you can, bring it back online, and in the process, to discover something about the AI, the people who worked with it, and what happened to them. The aesthetic and setting really drew me to this game, so I jumped in.

First off, the reason why I say it's "kind of" a metroidvania is because the title 'metroidvania' gets thrown around a lot these days for games that aren't really very suited to it, and in this case, there isn't really much of the traditional backtracking. At least, backtracking to hunt down goodies isn't really a thing, and unlocking new story areas as you get additional abilities only happens very occasionally. There also isn't really any kind of system where you can buy new upgrades or tailor your build in any way or customize your abilities like the charms system in Hollow Knight. So basically, this ends up mostly being a exploratory 3D platformer broken up by bits of combat. Unlike in many metroidvanias, the enemies don't respawn when you backtrack to an area, so the combat is non-repeating (which I consider to be a good thing). Anyway, I just mention this disclaimer here because if you're looking for something very metroidvania-y, this isn't really it.

The gameplay has a couple of flaws which I feel could have potentially been improved upon or refined with a bit of playtesting and can make the game a little frustrating for some players. For one, the platforming can be a bit exacting and finnicky, with some later areas requiring you to make jumps on to quite small platforms that you'll sometimes find yourself sliding off of unexpectedly. Precision platforming in 3D always has its pitfalls just by the nature of having to project 3D space on to a 2D screen, and those are apparent here. But the second issue, and potentially more serious because it can compound the severity of the platforming issues, is that the game can be quite dark. While this does work well with the visual style of the game's art, it can result in you sometimes having to make what may feel like blind jumps because the darkness of the game prevented you from seeing exactly where the edges of the platform were until you were somewhat close to it. After a while, though, you do get a time slowdown ability and a multi-jump that gives you a much bigger margin of error and smooths out these issues somewhat.

Despite the platforming issues, there's some elegant and clever design to be found in the levels. Many of them are quite open and without clear indications of where to go, and yet the pathways are always designed to subtly point your view in the direction that will make your next destination visible. Your route gets revealed in a way that feels very organic, and makes you feel as if you discovered it yourself through your own powers of observation and exploration, which is quite nice.

The combat is like, you shoot stuff. There are 5 different guns or so that you unlock over the course of the game and once you get the grenade launcher thing you'll basically never use anything else. It makes a nice satisfying kaboom and has the capability to blow you up if you use it at close range, which is one of the requirements I have for a weapon to be good. If I can't blow myself up with it, it can't be all that great a weapon, now can it?

Anyway, so, after describing the gameplay, it probably sounds like this game has some pretty serious flaws, yet I gave it 4 stars. What gives? Well, shit, what can I say. I'm not a critic. I really enjoyed the game and that's what matters to me in the end.

The type of story this game tells and the way it's told gave me reminders of the Talos Principle, and to me that's a very good thing, since it's one of my top 5 games of all time. You uncover text logs which are audio transcriptions of conversations between the human members of a certain base, and interactions between them and the AI named Hypervisor, who forms the center of this story. Outside of this, you hear bit about a war going on, and one in which the situation apparently seems quite grim for humanity. As you read the logs you see Hypervisor grow and change, as it tries its best to serve the human crew members. It learns, adapts, tries to gain an understanding of how humans think and communicate. At one point it even tries writing poetry. It's just an AI, and yet you get the feeling that when it says "I'm sorry" after messing up, it really means it. It seems genuine, and truly wants to find a way to improve and to be useful in any way that it can be. I've got a thing for AI stories, and a thing for uncovering the diaries of doomed people, so this checked some boxes for me.

Anyway, I had a great time with this. I've seen some people criticize it pretty harshly in the threads I could find about it, and I think that's too bad. Maybe one of the unfortunate consequences of living in a time in which there's such an overabundance of media to consume is that people tend to approach everything almost expecting to be disappointed if it turns out to be anything less than a masterpiece. And I think that's a pretty unfair way to judge art.