Refunded the game expecting it to be an expansion of the Teleglitch formula not because this game is necessarily bad. Although a sum of the negatives outweigh the positives for me. Starting from...

The Visuals:
Even though the game tries to aell itself as having more of a pixel look it's actually closer to low-poly which I honestly prefer majority of the time but you can't fully enjoy it because of the pixelization filter apart from the inventory. Some effects are definite hits like rain drops effects (even though it's not very logical as you look at everything from the camera view pointed downward) but most of them are miss (glitch effects are HARSH). Though visuals gets old quite fast as you dedicate most of your mental resources trying to see what's around you (bridges blend with surrounding water and feels like a corridor of invisible walls more than anything), a flashlight would be not just a lifesaver but simply a logical thing inside the game's universe.

The Setting:
Even though it's really well crafted I would say it starts to fall apart quite quickly. The notes feels like a useless filler mostly containing info of how this facility is apparently ominous (no sh*t). This is where comparison to Teleglitch is more apparent where logs contained either comedic descriptions of the items or purely technical info that contains a significant piece of the lore, though the MC of that game is ex-scientist and provides lore by themselve. Speaking about the character: the part about 40+ y.o. people being sent to sure death is realistic but as soon as your 51 y.o. woman does a backflip dodge... Let's just leave it at that.

The Difficulty:
As I played Teleglitch enough (still 0 wins at the time of the review) I picked the hard difficulty and it was just right: all of the monsters died by two melee hits, ammo was just enough and everything was good and everyone was happy until the game's "mini boss" hit me like a wall at nearly the fastest speed I encountered on the 1st level eating my bullets like nothing (although a turret helps a lot) but the second one who ate even more (and apparently can be killed with melee and a lot of ETG'sque dodges (not a fan). Monsters also clip through doorways and can't be damaged or sometimes even seen as they morph with obsticles... And the existence of the code locks made me scratch my head on why even are they here as this adds nothing. And respawning enemies is a strange choice to me. Overall many strange decisions that clashes with each other in a way I don't understand.

The Quality of life:
Let's start with UI that suffered the most – you can forget about it, it's nearly unusable just go to the inventory (and therefore pause the game all together) when your spidersense tells you that you are at risk, bullets ends when they end there's no way of tracking it.

The Controls:
This is a twin stick shooter at it's core but don't even try to use your gamepad as it is simply a depressing experience in it's default state. The character starts walking slowly as it's automatically enters the aiming mode as soon as you turn your stick in any direction (no separate aim button), the reloading and running are assigned to face buttons which is even more strange (reassigned them to back buttons which my controller allows me fortunately) and binding both map and inventory to D-pad is something I haven't seen in any other game previously constantly confusing them as what is what (thought you can switch between them not needing to exit either of them otherwise it would be extremely frustrating) and even are gadgets and devices? Aren't those, like, synonyms? Rhis is a no-gamepad game just accept it.

This is everything that made me personally frustrated. Some may overlook most of my complaints and some may find other things even more frustrating but let's just say that this game has a PS1 era hit or miss qualities that can be overshadowed by it's overall genius but sadly I never reached that part. If you didn't like this game for the same things as me I would highly recommend to give an old forgotten Teleglitch a try if you find the general concept of the game being your main reason you bought this game.

not really fun

very cool story/atmosphere