>>11945879
It's a transitional game for britbongs.
It knows that Japanese platformers use repetition and iteration but doesn't always use it to good effect. It edits down the usual mazes into looping patterns but now you often feel like you traveled everywhere and went nowhere. The controls are perfect and lag-free but the camera is awful. There was clearly playtesting done but it stopped at Venge Thicket.
I think it just needed more time. The Pickfords had a habit of needing to rush or cut down their games at the last second (read up on Equinox), but I'm not sure if that's an inherent quality of them or if they were the only two British people outside of Rare who gave a shit about their games being fun and kept running into resistance from the higherups. The UK computer game industry had low margins and low sales and made up for it with insane turnaround and it might've created bad habits in their managers.
