Sonic deploying a gratuitous show of affection to distract from the fact he’s jacked Noddy’s car.

I won’t go too deep, but I played the start of that game multiple times just to talk with Niamh, and her story with Oisin and Sasha is a great example of how mythology is threaded through the game and characters and stories. I credit it for a long and specific appreciation of tragic ancient ghosts…

Once you’re done, it’s also interesting to poke through the design docs the devs released a while back.
geekboss.com/blog/azraels...
The original vision was veeeery different, though I think it benefited massively from scaling back, while it still sells this big lonely warren of tunnels and temples.

They’ve aged really interestingly (even the much maligned UI has it’s charm!)

But the atmosphere is wonderful; the digitised textures, baked lighting, period art and architecture, voice acting and audio. At the time the graphics were rough, but for me the low res, crunchiness sells the world so well; cold stone, rusted metal and especially weird organic, too-grown growth.

Quietly cheered at the mention of Azrael’s Tear. It IS fascinating and I would 100% recommend playing it if you haven’t! The controls are pretty woeful and as I understand, it had the misfortune of coming out the same year as the original Tomb Raider and suffered in comparison.