Short version: Excellent game, knife-sharp writing, executes extremely well on its themes, very strongly recommend.

More detailed thoughts:

• Meghna Jayanth's writing has never been better, and if you know anything about her at all you'll know that's really saying something. Strikes a perfect balance of humor, commentary, and emotional resonance.
• 10/10 vocal performance across the board. Standouts are Farah Merani as Jala, Zehra Fazal as Aruni, and Sugith Varughese as Arvind.
• The music is quite good, with custom tracks for every single ex-suitor boss fight, but it's let down by unaccountably bad sound mixing that robs what could be electrifying soundscapes of a lot of their impact.
• Visuals are no slouch. Character designs are distinct and charming, with a refreshing diversity of bodies on offer. Colors pop, and the design of many major set pieces is nothing short of inspired.
• Combat system is very tight; think Persona 5 meets Super Mario RPG. This formula gets played with and subverted in some very engaging ways at certain points too.
• The cooking/conversation sequences alone were worth the price of admission.
• The skating is just... to put it nicely, I think perhaps the team at Outerloop started with making their main character a skateboarder and figured it'd be fun & quirky to have the player mostly get from Point A to Point B via skateboard, with additional mechanics for grinding, tricks, etc, only to realize too late that making a good skateboarding video game is actually Quite Difficult. Put less nicely: the skating is bad. Controls are atrocious, and Jala will frequently either snap onto entirely the wrong object after a jump or go careening off into oblivion regardless of input. I think they recognized how bad it was, as the few mandatory skating sequences have the option of letting the computer auto-complete them for you.
• Seriously I just want to have a frank and honest exchange of ideas with whoever at Outerloop decided Jala should skate almost everywhere, without the option to get off her board and walk. Yeah man I love colliding with a dozen stationary objects trying to cross one of the two tiny skateable maps
• This is a very LEAN experience. Like, I couldn't accurately call any aspect of it incomplete, but it does feel fair to say that it is complete by the very slimmest of margins. It's like a pre-portioned meal plan containing the precise amount of essential nutrients to get you through the day. There is a plot with characters, and those characters experience arcs and the plot resolves in a satisfying manner. There are a variety of different modes of interaction - skating, combat, cooking, conversation. All of these modes are explored sufficiently. There is a light amount of character customization and a limited amount of variability in how you can interact with other characters. Everything functions and everything looks professionally completed. It's all there, with not a drop spilled.
• Need to restate that these criticisms are very minor & this is a game that's very worth both your money and the 10 or so hours you'll spend playing it
• If you live in the Greater Vancouver area and have an ass like Diya's please hop in my Asks inbox. Please. Please