That's more or less exactly as it is. This feels like a natural progression from Sonic 3 & Knuckles to Sonic CD to Sonic Mania, taking the fundamentals each time and giving a slightly more polished and smooth graphical sheen with more expansive and creative design as the amount of storage space increases.

I was thinking the same thing. Matt and Trey seem to excel when they're under creative pressure, and it's not like this is the first time they've had to take characters in unplanned directions due to real life events (cf. Darth Chef).

^ So much this. :(

It's a really beautiful game, environment-wise, and I loved the audio interaction from being able to unobtrusively tap with the hand cursor on various materials. I'd also agree that spatially and architecturally, it's the most gorgeous of the games (not counting URU), but the puzzle design alternated from decently…

It was that community that eventually led to URU. URU Live had so much potential — the fact that it was killed without ever truly getting a chance to properly launch (and thus stuck with Beta bugs and design problems), followed by one lost year after another being retooled, first for single player, and next with a new…

Actually, I really liked that aspect of it (and with Myst). And I *loved* how they carried it over into the URU Guide… In fact, it was almost an alternate, parallel level of meta for the Myst->URU transition itself.