Underrated game that deserves more love than it's gotten.

It took me about 12 hours to complete this game. That isn’t terrible on paper, but honestly, I found myself wishing it were shorter.

For the story it’s trying to tell, the game feels like it’s trying too hard to be Portal. The puzzles do get harder as you go, which is generally a good thing, but as someone who is usually fine with this style of puzzle game, I struggled far more than expected. I had to look up a walkthrough multiple times.

Eventually, I found myself relying on the walkthrough less to understand the puzzles and more just to get through them faster so I could reach the story. That story, unfortunately, felt frustrating, confusing, and irritating at times. The game constantly pushes a sense of urgency, yet forces you to crawl at a snail’s pace due to the sheer number of puzzles you’re required to complete. Portal never buried its narrative under this much friction. I would have much preferred a shorter experience, or at least a better balance. More puzzles does not automatically mean a better game.

This leads to my next issue. Challenging puzzles are fine, but here the difficulty often comes at the expense of enjoyment and narrative flow. It actively detracts from the story instead of supporting it. By the end, the only thing motivating me to finish was the fact that I’d already paid for the game.

Next is the combat. Several mechanics were introduced that, honestly, felt unnecessary. There’s an entire sequence where you’re placed in a room full of bots and bomb cubes, complete with a joke encouraging you to throw the bombs at the enemies. In reality, you barely need to interact with any of it. As long as the bots don’t see you, they won’t fire, so you can simply move around them. If you manage to sneak up behind one, you can literally pick it up and throw it - bye-bye birdie - after which it explodes.

Lastly - and this is my biggest gripe - this is the only game I’ve played that effectively punishes you for running it on low graphical settings. My PC isn’t great, but the game runs smoothly on low quality, which I can accept if the story is strong. However, much of the lore is delivered through in-game computer terminals, and at low settings the screens are so unreadable that interacting with them becomes pointless. I literally could not read them. As a result, I have no idea what the deeper lore of this game even is.

If you’re playing on a lower-end PC, even if the game technically runs, don’t bother. You’ll only get half the experience. I ended up with a headache from trying.

This is especially disappointing because the core concept is genuinely interesting, and it’s clear a lot of passion went into this project. The game really wants you to care about its characters, and I wanted to as well. But between the pacing, the puzzle overload, and the accessibility issues, I just couldn’t.

Like Tenet? Go play this.