The taupe word "Mixed" still lingers on Dark And Darker Gold the Steam page, but the review section is one of the most considered and eloquent I've seen on Steam. None of them are bashing the game or getting on their knees and praising it. 

They're on a knife edge where we all understand that Backbone's good elements such as the music and art are offset by a the final act that goes so off the rails that it's only going to appeal to a very particular person. And to recommend that experience to someone could go well or terribly wrong.

A big spoiler warning if you're interested in Backbone: skip the next paragraph. A key part of Backbone is that the more it progresses, the less choices you can make. This eventually spins into a situation where your protagonist is deathly ill in what could have been an entirely avoidable situation. 

He strays from the path I would have picked for him and feel helpless as he puts himself in harm's way. It's a meditation on determinism, but going from that involved puzzling gameplay to just letting the worst shit ever happen to the main character… it felt unfinished. It felt like it was missing something.

I was always annoyed that I didn't like Backbone's ending, despite loving its world. Yet while being annoyed, it's always lingered on my mind as an unsolvable conundrum. Why didn't that ending work? Why did it stray so far from what the game began as? 

That made me all the more Dark And Darker Gold for sale interested in the new prequel to Backbone—the story of the people (er, animals) in Backbone before they met and found themselves in that dire situation, and its demo is available in the Steam Next Fest right now.