Well, I just finished the game for the first time. After the final boss fight, which was cool as hell, I think I can safely say it's one of my favorite games ever.
The music perhaps wasn't quite as good as Bastion's, but it wasn't too far off either. The general sound and visual design I feel was also on the same level of quirky awesomeness also. The story of the game was good, though perhaps not especially so. I have much more praise for the way it was actually told, which I think is a perfect example of the interesting ways you can deliver a story by mixing it in the gameplay. Somewhat reminiscent of Bastion's narrator in having just a single really vocal character - but also different in many ways. Even though the protagonist's character couldn't be expanded through her own dialogue, or by direct descriptions by a narrator, they still found many other ways to do so. I even found myself digging through all the bits of information I could get from the various side characters that also function as your abilities.
Speaking of the abilities - I don't think I've ever before seen a combination system like this (not that I can think of many comparable examples) done in such a compelling way. Even with the number of them, I felt that every ability was distinct in it's function and I couldn't find a single one that I'd consider straight up useless. Better yet, even changing a single one in the combination of three abilities useable as a single function had a clear effect. Usually when a game gives me a lot of options I find myself in the end defaulting to the same set for most of it, but in this case it only happened with a single ability - it was hard to get used to playing without the mobility of Jaunt (basically a blink), but that's perhaps just the fact that I revolved my entire playstyle around it. I was changing my loadout every single check point, just because I wanted to test more things. Backed up by the solid implementation of a mix of turn based and real time gameplay and the good enemy variety, only thing I can really think of that the gameplay missed was perhaps some more variety in the terrain - a little bit more of a vertical element could have been good to bring out more possible uses in the abilities. And well, to top it all off the excellent boss fight that brought a completely new element of strategy to the gameplay.
It's somewhat telling that the only game that I can really draw comparison to is Bastion. Largely because of the similarities between the two games, but also just because I can't come up with many other games even nearly on the same level of awesome in just pure style. I'm considering going back to playing it right away - it wasn't too long of a playthrough, and I feel like there's just too much experimentation left to be done for me to say I'm done with the game. And it's just the most damn fun I've had with a game in a long damn time.
