Excellent vibes and decent puzzle design but a relentlessly bleak story makes this one a miss.

I know what you're probably thinking: "it's a horror game about an orphanage, were you expecting something happy?" but hear me out, okay? I've played plenty of games with grim storylines and depressing endings and this is on another level. Orphans starving in cages, orphans being whipped until they bleed, orphans....having worse things happen that I won't spoil. Every single orphan NPC you can interact with talks about how they miss their home and how they are hungry and sad and tired and suffering and oh my gosh we get it already. The first few experiences were effective but by the time I met the fifth orphan dealing with something horrific, I didn't even care anymore. At a certain point you just run out of sympathy and need some new emotions to experience.

As I said, I was prepared for a dark story but there needs to be more to the story to make it worth the misery. The game's description talks about confronting "the dark legacy of Quebec’s Catholic institutions and the children left in their care" but this is just a collection of awful things happening to innocent children over and over and over until the game ends. It's important to remember the past, yes, but I already know that bad things happen to vulnerable children, so what ELSE do you have to say?

In terms of actual gameplay, there's some very good puzzles and the dream world in particular required a lot of brain power. Mostly, it was just nice to get a break from experiencing and contributing to the horrors at the orphanage.


The games ends on a "to be continued......" but I won't be coming back for anything else. I'm already exhausted by this game's universes and I won't be spending any more time exploring them