Just finished Xanadu Next. I enjoyed it a lot.
At first I had worries it might suffer from coasting due to some easy puzzles and combat that felt more stat-based than skill-based. But it quickly opens up to be much more than that.
The level design is fantastic - individual locations and dungeons are small, but they have interwoven paths and rooms that link back to other locations in the world. There are many systems that impact your risk and damage output, and while they give you a lot of choice in a first playthrough, their potential will be realised in repeat playthroughs.
Xanadu Next features an end-game ranking system, where you’re ranked on aspects like Time, Number of Deaths, Number of Saves and Treasure found, so you can never truly be finished with it until you take your knowledge of the game and reapply it in new ways on a future playthrough.
Given the game’s short length it works very well, and I’m certainly going to be back once I find an old computer monitor to do justice to its visuals. 1024 x 768 upscaled on a modern 2560 x 1440 does not do it justice, and the game’s interface was made for 640 x 480 output.