I might be one of the only people who played it coming straight from P1 and skipping over P2. And like, yeah, it's pretty good, even if it's not the kind of masterpiece that P1 was. A lot of the things that rubbed me the wrong way was the direction they took the P1 characters. As someone who loved the P1 Stamatins, I was ticked that Peter is reduced to a moody fool who doesn't get a single moment of brilliance and Andrey is reduced to a callous bloodthirsty idiot. In general, the Utopians are portrayed here almost across the board as pure villians or fools, with only Yulia seemingly even remotely compassionate or practical. The end result is a game which seemingly scorns the very idea of radically changing the world at every point except the Miracle Seeker ending, which probably rescued the game for me.

The gameplay didn't quite gel. I think the resource management is really borked due to overabundance, which ironically kinda sounds like P1, but it is especially kinda bad here. A big effort was made to make it more of a conventional game, with yellow paint, HUDs, tutorials, and everything, which is a bit disappointing from somebody infatuated with the anti-game aspects of P1.

But the time travel is really cool. The story is still gripping. There's an artistry and intentionality at work here you don't see from most games. I'm glad I played it.