I recently took a chance on Redacted because I saw a youtube review and it looked like sci-fi Hades. And honestly the gameplay is fine but the announcer making already dated pop culture references and being unfunnily snarky turned me off so much that I refunded it at around 90 minutes in.
It basically is Hades some minor mechanics tweaks, slightly less open environments and a "rivals" mechanic that adds another layer of both strategy and randomness to each run.
I didn't hate it but nothing was so good that I didn't uninstall after the announcer said "this isn't barney the dinosaur" after I died to the level boss.
Game link here if anyone has a stronger stomach for that stuff than I do: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2229940/REDACTED/
Bastion was the rare example where the story and the voice work actually made the game interesting enough to keep playing. The rest was a kind of forgettable roll-shoot-roll-shoot gameplay loop. I actually met the voice actor and one of the character artists at PAX back in like 2009 and told them as much.
Sadly, they're probably ultra-woke now if they're still in the game industry.
Yeah Bastion's gameplay was pretty forgettable, but it was passable enough to not be an active detriment while the voice acting (and soundtrack, which is unforgettable) carried it. The fact that it actively responds with different lines to different actions you take in real time is still a feat that isn't utilized much to this day.
Also, while its against the common opinion here, I don't think they are ultra-woke. They were always vaguely Left. Though it really comes down to if you allow for Left and Woke to not just be synonymous, but Woke being a form of Far Left nonsense.
Because otherwise they were Woke before Woke because Bastion is literally "racism bad" the entire game about how the evil Mediterranean looking whites are so racist against the pale Asian looking people they blow up the world by accident trying to genocide them. And Transistor is "democracy is bad" the game.