This game is a 4/10 at best. The controls are clunky and touchy and just generally annoying to use. They are simple, but they just don't work well. Finding the tiny spots of interest is tedious as hell.

The controls are abysmal. Do you enjoy pixel-hunting? Well, we tied that to a flashlight which swings in wild arcs, refuses to interact with items which are too close (i.e. within interaction range) and sometimes causes the screen to slide from left to right at nauseating speed when you change directions! While using the flashlight, your movement will be slowed to a sedate walk, which is great because all the flavourful environmental descriptions are also revealed by the flashlight :) How do you know if an object can be picked up or otherwise interacted with? Simply mouseover>E>right arrow>space. Oh, sorry - it's only a (very flavourful) description. Try again with the next one!

Puzzle games are my jam, and abstruse puzzles are a staple of escape-the-room games, but my frustration with the controls had me resorting to a walkthrough within the first twenty minutes. The point I gave up involved a puzzle where you are supposed (with no hints) NOT to shoot a security robot, because if you hide it'll run diagnostics; somewhat unintuitive, since the previous several minutes involved shooting multiple security robots in a row.

There's nothing wrong with this kind of trial-and-error gameplay, but if you go that route then the controls need to be simple. Escape games can get away with pixel-hunting because a single mouse click is enough to give you all you need: a description. an item, or both. If you force me to use a four-control combo simply to find out whether I am allowed to interact with something, I'm going to stop trying. An earlier reviewer mentioned the game feels like an old-style text adventure (>get pan >use pan on floor >I'm sorry, I can't do that >use pan on nest) and they're right: this would be excellent as a text adventure with animations.

I bought this game mainly on the strength of the story, which is genuinely intriguing, well written and well-voiced. It's a shame, then, that the "game" part is such a chore. If you can look past the flaws, there may be a great narrative at the end of things; I'm giving up while I'm ahead.

This game has 3 main aspects: movement+combat, puzzles and narrative.

Puzzles are unnecessarily convoluted and mostly rely on forcing you to backtrack through levels for clues spawned by solving other puzzles. Otherwise there doesn't seem to be any logical way of solving them. The crying baby one was the worst offender with its utterly absurd solution (sure, it was jus as amusing, but good luck figuring it out on your own)

Combat and movement can only be described as clunky. In sections requiring quick reflexes they will be your greatest obstacle.

The narative is its only redeeming quality, but at times presents you with do-or-don't "choices", which actually are no choices at all, because there's no alternative way to progress the story. Like it or not, you have to perform the action. Why frame it as a choice, then? It does make sense as a meta-narrative technique, given the themes of this story, so fair enough.

Overall, the story is decent and the game is short so you won't have to suffer through its flaws for too long.

terrible.

The game looks in and of itself really interesting. I definitely like the concept. But unfortunately it suffers from really wonky controls. The moment you move the mouse across a "left/right threshold" the camera jumps to that side. It is a bit disorientating. But most of all it makes it much harder to focus on the interactive objects on screen. If you move the mouse just a teensy bit too much to one direction the whole screen shifts to the other side which makes you re-target. And if not careful the same thing will happen in the opposite direction at that moment.

In just the few minutes I played, I stared at my screen jumping left/right/left/right and back way too many times.

If you don't mind this, then the game may be fun. It certainly looks fun.

Game soft-locked at the first fish. This is why multiple saves are important!

Genuinely interesting setting let down by pixel hunting and a clunky newgrounds-era control scheme.

PC controls were a button mashing mess, combat was irrelevant, convoluted adventure game logic in many of the puzzles. After wandering around for much of the first hour I just opened a walkthrough guide and suffered through to reveal an interesting story. Despite my playing a lot of puzzle/adventure games, I found this one not worth the 4 hours out of my life.

★☆☆☆☆ Terrible!


I've played this game using a keyboard and a 360 controller and the controls are poor - responsiveness is stiff and delayed in both cases, but I found it to be a little easier to play with a gamepad due to the funky keys/combination presses and holds you need to use.

The puzzles are basic: use a thing on this thing to get to the next place. Its never really goes beyond that, but due to level design you often need to walk around looking for the objects or the place, backtracking is often needed. The combat is not as good. You have a gun, just one, as your weapon and there's only a few different enemy types in the whole game. You can also stealth, but you can't move while stealth.

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As a whole, not terrible, but rather mediocre.

What's terrible are the controls and the combat system. The controls feel very stiff. The design of the combat system on its own is repetitive and time-consuming, and is made to feel tedious by the awful controls. The basic combat loop is as such: You stay in cover (you get a cloaking mechanism very early on, so you can basically take cover wherever you're standing), wait for the enemy to get out of cover and fire a few shots, and then they will just freeze there for a few seconds so you can get some shots in before they return back to their cover. It's not challenging, but just feels like a waste of time. This is just one type of enemy, of course, the most basic type, but you encounter it in numbers throughout the game, and honestly the other enemies aren't much better, if at all. I personally could have done without the combat, though I guess they needed an excuse to give our protagonist a gun, which is used in some puzzles.

The puzzles themselves are okay in a vacuum. Pretty much your standard point-and-click-style inventory puzzles. What's annoying is that to interact with an object, you have to aim your gun at it with the flashlight on. Poor aiming controls makes examining your surroundings a chore. There's also a fair bit of backtracking and no fast travel, so you get the picture.

The story was intriguing while playing it and was shaping up to be something pretty good, but then you get hit with a cliffhanger ending which leaves many questions unanswered, so it was rather unsatisfying in the end. I understand there is a sequel to the game which may or may not wrap things up, but I'm not that keen on playing it after the first game, to be honest. I do already own the sequel as I bought both games in a bundle, but if didn't already own it, I would most likely skip it after playing the first game.

The best thing about the game is undoubtedly the atmosphere. It is dark and chilling. Really makes you feel alone and abandoned. Reminds me a bit of The Swapper, another side-scrolling sci-fi puzzle game, though that is a much, much better game than this. I actually bought this game because I thought it would be similar to that game, but unfortunately the atmosphere is the only thing that compares. I'll still give the sequel a chance, but not in the immediate future.

Loved absolutely everything except the puzzles, which is the core mechanic. They feel like a guess work and not actually a puzzle solving. Also, the interactive elements are somehow occluded within the environment, which tends to make you look at every possible place in the areas carefully of fear of missing something important that you may need to solve the puzzle, which is a no-no for me in games, I don't want to lose my time looking at every single particular corner just to find nothing 99% of the time. I guess if you play it looking at a guide and treat it more like watching a movie, then it is for you.