I’d been looking forward to this game for about a year. I’d expected it to be unique and psychedelic, which it is, but it also excels in ways I wasn’t expecting.

From the sound design and music to the expansive world to the many distinctive forms of the player avatar, this is a profound step forward from Sam Atlas’s earlier Space Hole games. And abstract as it is, I found it to be oddly affecting at times.

Something like this deserves a wide audience more than many of the big-budget games with painfully formulaic design that get all the attention. But I’m glad Extreme Evolution exists and I’d recommend it to anyone who thinks it looks intriguing at all.