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.

I REALLY wanna recommend this game.

I like certain parts of this game, I really do.
The combat, art style, sound design, and atmosphere are all great.

The problems arise when you look at the actual mechanics at play around all of it.

This is very much a survival horror game, at least in the sense that you have to make tough decisions relating to what supplies you expend. Now, the way it does this is interesting.
Ammo, in general, is pretty damn plentiful. However, the player's lack of inventory space leads to a lot of emergent choices when it comes to the type of supplies you'll take with you, as well as the supplies you leave behind. You will constantly have to choose between carrying an extra weapon and it's ammo, or taking that medkit that you'll surely need in the future. But, if you bring that weapon and ammo, the enemy may not get close enough to make a medkit necessary. Or what about that sentry equipped with a laser? Or the armor plates? You can't carry them all...

When you die, you lose everything your character had on them, including stat buffs you may have purchased from an upgrade shop. You then play as a new "volunteer" and continue from the beginning of the level where you died. New Game+ adds a mechanic where you only have 10 volunteers to complete the game with.

Here's where the problem arises.
When you die, you can find the corpse of your previous character to recover some of your supplies.
SOME of them.
All of those supplies that you spent 1-2 hours collecting? Gone. Only a few scraps remain for you to collect.
The game seems to be balanced around the player stockpiling ammo and items for certain scripted events and bossfights, as well as the unlucky encounters with multiple "elite" enemy types.
So, when you die, it creates a snowball effect where you have less and less ammo/supplies each subsequent death. This effectively forces you to restart your run if you die once.

Adding to this, the level that you died on will magically rearrange itself, respawning all enemies/bosses, despite you finding your body later in the area. This also means that the supplies you expended up to the point where you died have been made null, further worsening the snowball effect mentioned earlier.

All of this could be fixed by simply making the corpse of your previous character retain their whole inventory, while keeping the map in the same instance where your previous character died.

You also are heavily incentivized to clear the level of enemies as you proceed so as to not be attacked from behind as you progress. If you're fighting a large, focus-demanding enemy, you're gonna be glad that you cleared the area behind you so that nothing sneaks up on you during the fight, right?

Wrong. Enemies, after certain objectives are met, seemingly respawn throughout areas, effectively making all the clearing you just did pointless.

There's a couple other small annoyances: Your character moving for a full second after letting go of a movement key. The dodge mechanic sending you in seemingly random directions at times, potentially throwing you into a laser or enemy.

To me, it's a testament to how severe I think these design decisions are when everything else is so well done.

very cool story/atmosphere