Recent reviews by Simbiat

I think the main problem of this game is that it can be quite inconsistent.

The one thing that you would probably notice first are the graphics. Some shots in this game look outright gorgeous (at least on ultra settings), but then you get a cut and see that looks downright awful. I see 3 main reasons for this:

1. A lot of heavy blur. I guess for "cinematic effect" or for "boke". Sometimes it can look ok, but very often it simply does not work properly around the objects. You will notice a lot of issues with around hair. Quite a few characters have somewhat wavy hair, and the camera is pointed at their face and you can see the locks of their hair you will notice how blur leaves huge margin around them. This effect just ruins the picture. Similar artefacts can happen during movements, too, including your own camera movements (which makes camera control even worse, when camera zooms into character's back while in some tight corner).

2. Lighting. Again, in some shots - amazing work. In others you can notice light (or shadow) where it probably should not be. I personally noticed it a lot when there was a camera switch, essentially showing same place from different angles. In most cases it was pretty minor, and I would consider this nitpicking. But on the other hand I saw quite a few random reflections during free-roam moments: the reflections made certain props shiny, when looking at them from another angle showed that they probably should not be (made of wood or stone). I also had quite annoying artefacts of random light particles of different colors pop-up and quickly disappear.

3, Facial animation. Once again, sometimes it is L.A. Noire level, you can see where the budget went. But at other times it's not so much facial expressions as grimaces, they are overly articulated. And I am not talking about moments where it might have been intentional. Take notice of smiles for examples, they often bare whole two jaws, which is definitely not natural.

Gameplay-wise it could also be a bit inconsistent. I think, mostly in terms of amount of your involvement in the scenes through-out the game. This was especially noticeable with chapters 9 and 10, because you can have several relatively short scenes of different characters with maybe 1 choice. In a movie or TV show that probably would have worked towards tension building for the finale, but in this game, I was wondering what was even the point, because it was breaking the pace, without providing much.

The story... Overall, I did enjoy it. It was better than Man of Medan, felt a bit more "mature", and it definitely was several heads above House of Ashes. The 1 chapter (not the prologue) probably could be considered a bit long, but it did quite a good job in establishing the characters and their relationships. They can be considered somewhat cliche at first, but they can get pretty decent character development (obviously depends on your choices).

There were some minor things, that bothered me, though. There were smaller moments when characters seemingly behaved out of character. For example closer to the end Emma, who gave us a solid look under her facade earlier, suddenly starts behaving as if she is high. And also deaf when there is practically no obstructions between her and other characters.

There were also moments that did not make much sense at all, even if you consider a brain fart happening to a character. For example, there is a moment when Jacob can lose something, when he goes for a swim. He stored that something in his pants. He somehow realizes that he lost it while he is not wearing those pants, and those pants were supposed to be not far from him, and he does not check or retrieve them later.

I think both of the examples above are result of the way the story is structured, and the way it was tested. It is essentially made up of pieces, right? Because of the choices and thus variations of what can happen at certain point depending on your past choices. There is also an aspect of narration switching between characters in a mostly chronological order. I think story was tested in this almost chronological order along with the switching. If someone took the pieces and ordered them into perspective of 1 character and followed all the respective lines separately, they could have noticed those little discrepancies.

What I did not like was... The tarot cards. Or rather the woman that appears before the chapters (won't name her, because her name may be considered a spoiler). She is a similar concept as Curator from Dark Pictures. It is kind of an attempt to turn you, player, into character in the story through communication with another entity. And I have a problem with how this is done here.

With Curator it made at least some sense to me: he had lots of books, each book containing a story. While it was never directly said, you could extrapolate, that those books allow you to roleplay a bit. Dunno if such books still exist, but in my childhood we had small books (more like comics, really), where at certain pages you had to make a choice and depending on the choice you had to go to either page X or page Y and continue reading from there. So maybe Curator's books are like that, and then you are, indeed, a character in the story and it somewhat works, regardless of who Curator really is.

The woman in "The Quarry" does not work like that. Without spoiler, the woman is part of the story. She even has her own agenda, and her own expectations of you (unlike Curator, who was mostly indifferent to your choices). That itself is fine, nothing new in story-telling with one of the characters telling the story. But she is chronologically relevant in the main plotline. That would make you, player, chronologically relevant as well, which would imply your physical existence near the location where the main event transpire. And that... Just does not work here. There are no indications of existence of an entity, that could be the player, besides epilogue, where player is referenced through the collectibles (which is pretty cool, not gonna lie), but that does not establish player's existence anywhere near the campers during the events described. Maybe after the events, but not during.

But again, overall I did enjoy the story, even though my ending felt a bit anticlimactic. At least I would have wanted to see a bit more of interactions between campers and how their relationships changed. In fact, I think this probably would be a level of production and kind of gameplay that I would want to some of the stories I have in mind, that could work as a game. Would I recommend it? Yes, but probably at a discount.

I have only played Man of Medan(MoM), but it was enough for me to not have high expectations, since that game was not that great, but the way choices worked there still made me curious for other games of the series. Once I saw a relatively good discount on this one, I decided to buy it, and... I will be refunding it.

It's just worse than MoM. I think I won't spoil much, saying that we get into the main place of the game only after 1.5 hours of gameplay, which is considerable amount of time. It is not that much different compared to MoM, since there we had a significant chunk happening outside of the ship, too, so this alone is probably not an issue. But this chunk being boring and completely brain-dead is.

In MoM you had to be quite active in the first chapter. There was quite a few things going on, even though not all of them were directly related to the main story. You had action, though, and the way it was distributed was quite logical. The dialogues, while somewhat corny, were able to give you initial idea of the characters and develop some not necessarily negative feelings towards them. "House of Ashes" fails in both regards.

The 1.5 hours that I've played were boring. Yes, even the first small portion (tutorial) was boring, even though it should have been a piece setting up the "horror mood". It did not feel scary in any way, it did not have any weight behind it. The last portion of these 1.5 hours also were boring despite it having seemingly more action, since military operation goes wrong and there is a firefight. Let alone the "ground-breaking" moment at the end did not make any sense.

As for characters, all of them seemed unlikeable to me. Maybe because of the dialogues, which was worse that MoM, or because of their actions, or both. If MoM was like a B-movie, this one was more like a C-movie (if the letter stood for grade). Characters were copy-pasted from low-budget military movies of late 80s and 90s. I get that these kind of stereotypes must come from somewhere, but when all characters are behaving almost exactly the same with very minor nuances between them, it is just painful to watch.

That's not all there is, sadly, because it's gotten worse in other areas, too. Models and animations were very plastic, and I saw quite a few clipping moments (like eyebrows clipping with hat or glasses clipping into forehead). The camera somehow got worse, too. I did not like the forced angles in MoM, but "free-roam" camera in this game is even less playable, mostly because of how it behaves near walls in close quarters. With most of the game happening in close quarters.

I honestly do not understand the praise the series is getting. Obviously it's not the worse games ever, but "very positive" rating on Steam seams a bit high. "Mixed" feels more appropriate. Maybe these games play better in coop? I am not going to test that, though, because I am refunding "House of Ashes" and removing the other games from wishlist. I do not recommend this.

Now this is a proper way to make a sequel.

It's been roughly a year since I played the first game, so the experience of it is still quite fresh, especially since it was a fresh experience compared to a lot of games I've played. This game is, essentially, more of the same, but [mostly] better. It is still crazy, unique and sometimes trippy level design, mostly linear, but with a bit of exploration (just the right amount to encourage collecting everything without wasting too much time). The plot felt a bit simpler, with me seeing a plot twist miles away, but then, right after that twist, which proved me correct, there was another twist, which I did not expect at all.

It is not perfect, though. There were a couple of moments that were a bit annoying, for example, especially those when you need to ride a ball. Detalization of the story and levels may not be as great as in the first game. Like, I doubt I will remember the levels just as vividly in a year, even though they were really nice, and some of them did have interesting quirks. The exploration of psychology was also not as obvious, I guess. Here, in most cases, you need to think quite a bit more about the "hidden meaning" of different elements and behaviors, compared to first game, where things were usually presented in such a way, that also explained the said meaning.

But nonetheless, this was a really good experience for me, and I definitely recommend the game. At least it's worth a try, although probably with a small discount (25% or more if you're lucky). I really wish that "Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin" would not require VR, since it is referenced in this game, but I am not sure I am ready to buy a VR headset for it or any other VR game.

Don't buy this game. And not because you should not be able to buy it anymore (besides maybe physical copies, if any), but because you should not support this level of "we don't care about our product", which this game has. Every time I encountered a bug in this game, I was like "Let's finish this after all, maybe the story will end in some interesting way, or maybe the side quests or DLC quests will be interesting, maybe all of this will be worth it", but then I encountered a bug, that blocked my progression entirely, and I just had enough of this.

My first bug was in mission House Call. The whole mission was a huge bug, and this has been reported at least 2 years before support for the game was shutdown. 2 years. And it was not fixed, because no one cared about it. For a lot of people this bug would make the level completely unplayable (even without the need to reload checkpoints at certain points).

Then I had several instances of heroes just hanging indefinitely in places, where mission needed to end or when it was supposed to move to different location through a lift. All heroes in a team would just stand there, playing their idle animations and nothing was happening, and you had no control, and, of course no ability to reload checkpoint - just to exit the game entirely.

Then there was a mission where I got the most weird bug, which is, apparently, not a bug, but design. The objective is to destroy 2 transformers or something like that. To do that, you need to stand near one, hold action button so that your character pulls out a tube-like thing from the wall, and then you kick and punch that tube till it blows up. But there is a catch: if you kill all enemies before you interact with either of the transformers - you won't be able to interact with hem ever again. There will be no prompt, the transformers will not receive any damage, nothing. The only solution is to reload the checkpoint and interact with both transformers before killing off the enemies, that is you will need to, probably, absorb some damage while doing this.

The very first side-mission for Captain America had a similar objective, but with 3 transformers, and it did not work for me at all, even if I did not kill anyone (which is practically impossible, if your companions are doing that for you). Maybe this was because I was playing as Iron-man, though. Which should not be possible, because the mission clearly states, that Captain America will be selected, but then before the mission starts I can just change him. Looks like even this feature was not tested by anyone.

Issues continued till the last mission in the main scenario. Firstly, there were some switches that are extremely difficult to see even for me, a person without color blindness, but that's ok, maybe I do not understand something. Secondly, there was a place, where you have a fight with something like a mid-level boss, and after that you need to follow Hulk again. You start the new section in an area, which has a chest in it. If you open that chest and then jump on to the next platform, 95% chance you will die, because platform collapses under you the moment you land on it, because it was on a timer, that was not telegraphed from the start (there is a purple thing there that appears a few seconds after the cutscene). But that's only half of it - after you fall, you will get a black screen with nothing happening, until you reload checkpoint.

That's not all. Then there was another place, where you need to hit 2 switches with you shield to drop down a climbable wall. I did not even see those switches, until I was able to actually reach the next platform, for which that wall was required. Because Captain America did find invisible footing somehow. Which is fine, it does not stop progression, after all. But then there is another bug right after that, which does. You need to stand on a button and hit another 2 switches with your shield. Easy enough, but... One of them does not react to your attacks at all. Reloading checkpoint does not help, and you need that switch to progress further. I've wasted half an hour trying to find a way forward, until I gave up on this game completely.

Even without the bugs, though, it's not that good of a game. Combat system did not inspire me, I did not feel the need to change combos that often besides the fight with Taskmaster early in the game. It was too grindy for me, although it may be somewhat more fun with coop. Some design elements here and there were questionable, for example through-out the bases there were these switches, that were supposedly used by workers on those bases, but the way to interact with them was to hit them 3 times: why would workers need such a way to interact with their machines? This was stupid even for comics-based world. Let alone that in some instance they stopped working for me until checkpoint reload.

The story and missions around that story were also mostly bland, and it was clear that things were designed with idea of online multiplayer coming before anything else. For example the way heroes stopped in place during certain cutscenes, including those, that were not movies. The maps were large, which could be fun, but they were large only for the sake of prolonging your journey to the final destination, rather than for the sake of you actually exploring those maps. I mean, design of those maps is ok in general, but you are pushed into exploration through random markers in your HUD, that move you away from the main mission, and not  through some peculiar structures in the distance.

At the same time, the game did have some good moments, when I would say I was immersed in the situation. Even the opening sequence, when you play as Kamala and explore the A-Day convention. At first, I was skeptical about it, since it's just walking around, when this is supposed to be an action game, but it did help to get acquainted with Kamala, and it reminded of those short intermissions in Mafia, where you drove some passengers around or walked a girl home. It built an atmosphere.

There were also some really good chase scenes, which felt really intense and looked awesome. But even they were spoiled by camera that took away your control at specific moments, forcing you to readjust its position, or a very obnoxious rumble from the gamepad. Oh, it's horrible, since almost every little interaction causes vibration, and sometimes you get a slight vibration when there is seemingly nothing trigger it, except your character maybe touching some junk on the ground during a turn. But those chase scenes were so great, that it did not matter.

I believe that this game needed more of that. Because that's what made Marvel movies so popular initially and why DC tried to copy them. I remember I went to 1st Iron-man movie with my mom. She did not care for Marvel or super heroes in general, but for some reason went with with me, and she really enjoyed the movie. As she explained it, she was able to turn off her brain and just watch the crazy (yet mostly logical) things happening on the screen. Yet it was not just action, there were emotions there as well, there was character development. Somehow recent movies do not have that, or at least they do not balance things properly.

If this game was made with focus on intense chases fighting scenes, high-stakes and high-reward moments instead of finding ways to keep people in game to spend more money - it could have been a good game even with its simplistic plotlines. But alas, it did not. Even though I played beta and did not have high expectations, I was still very disappointed and frustrated, to an extent that I would call this one of the worst gaming experience in recent years. Yes, worse than New Tales from the Borderlands, which was just cringe all over.

It started really good, but that did not last for me, unfortunately.

First of all, a bit of context: I have not played "Breath of The Wild", which inspired this game, but I did play "Genshin Impact", which is supposed to be (and is) quite similar gameplay wise. This means, that some of my complaints may be intrinsic to this type of games in general, not this game specifically. I also finished "Assassin's Creed Odyssey", which is somewhat similar both in terms of open-world and general Greek mythology theme.

The prologue of the game felt quite nice. There was a lot of humor, but it was well-paced and [usually] well-placed. The way you were introduced to mechanics through the story was good, even though the "mystery" of the first quest chain ended up to be a bit contrived. The quest chain also did not feel as if it was forcing you to just follow it, providing you enough time to wander about, if you wanted. The combat was simple, but fun, although I do not understand why most of the monsters were flying away from me at high speeds almost on every kill: that felt out of place. It was quite a good experience overall. But then I reached the point, when the game truly became open-world, and everything collapsed.

The humor in dialogues started feeling stale and even annoying. There was too much of it, even though there were moments of silences during free-roaming. I honestly became tired of it pretty soon, because almost every line of dialogue tried to be a joke of some kind. Furthermore the gods did not differ that much from each other, essentially just voices and some theme for jokes, that carried over from dialogue to dialogue. They were annoying and utterly pointless in their existence. To me this also ruined the story, which obviously did not try to invent anything to begin with.

The combat became stale pretty fast, too. It was quite repetitive, and I honestly did not see much point in skills, that you can buy with coins here. There was not that much depth to it. Perhaps, if I played on higher difficulty, that would have been different, but I think it would have just made me use dodge more often. Although, it did bring a little bit of satisfaction when I tried to keep the combo meter high and succeeded, which did not seem to do anything in terms of rewards. I also did not like the fact that 3 or 4 of the skills (godly powers) were unlocked through coins without any story behind them, as the rest of them. I find this a wasted opportunity, because they are god powers, not regular physical skills as in latest Assassin's Creed trilogy, so some short story would have been nice. It could have benefited from elemental effects, too, because they can make fighting a bit more diverse.

What's worse, the open world felt pointless, or rather it was here to stretch out the experience. A very good example is a quest, where you need to move a large pearl into the sea. First you need to walk quite a distance towards the pearl, and then you need to push it towards the sea for like 10 minutes, if not more. It felt like a chore, and not because of monsters forced on you along the path: it was slow and uninteresting. Before this I completed a vault where you needed to push balls to solve a puzzle and even that was much more interesting.

But even if that was not the case, I did not feel inspired to walk around this world. Yes, it looks quite beautiful, no argument from me there, and there is stuff to do there, which is mostly puzzles and vaults (which are kind of puzzles, too), but that's not enough. When I played Genshin, I was progressing slowly through the story, because I was constantly noticing something interesting a bit off the path I had to follow and I went there to investigate, even if there was nothing interesting, in the end. Things were placed on the map in right places to specifically trigger your curiosity. There were not things like this in Fenyx Rising, most of the things I noticed when looking around were generic or just mountainy landscapes.

Even if there were more things picking my curiosity, I do not think I would have went for them, because traversal of the world was boring, too. Or maybe just because I did not like quite a few things about it:

1. To jump higher you can hold jump button, but there is not that much difference in height. And it's mostly pointless, since you unlock double-jump pretty earlier in the game, too (as part of main story).
2. To glide you need to press jump button and then press glide button, which is a separate one. For me it often resulted in losing just a little bit of height, because I needed to switch to a different button. I would prefer to start gliding by holding jump button, and I believe this is how it worked in Genshin.
3. There is not that much difference between running horse and running you. There is a small difference in speed, but it's like 10 vs 11 meters/second. Maybe 10 vs 12. The only real benefit from a horse is that it's a secondary stamina meter, meaning that you can move at this speed longer, but this gets ruined by the fact that you need to summon the horse and then to drop off of it.
4. There is a lot of  mountains that you just have to climb, and climbing is slow. Of course, I would not expect the speed of AC Odyssey here, but... No, scratch that, here it would have made much more sense, because this is a fairy tail, while AC Odyssey is, technically, not. Increasing speed even at the cost of stamina would have been a godsend here. Or at least a way to speed it up through upgrades.

I remember playing AC Odyssey and just loving to go around checking those question marks on map. It did not have the design filled with curious things "along the way" as Genshin had, but the feeling that traversal of the world had was really good. Not as good as web-swinging in Spider-Man games or even in AC Unity, but good enough for me to get satisfaction just from running around.

Overall, I think this game suffered from its ambitions. If this was a more linear experience with somewhat smaller world, which is open more in a sense of Bioshock type of games, rather than true open-world, with traversal having feeling closer to Assassin's Creed games, with elemental effects in combat, a bit less humor, but more detailed characters - it could have been a really good game. But I guess I am describing something really different, so maybe this is just not a game for me. Good thing, that I, at least, got it at a discount.

Even though it's quite minimalistic and sometimes simplistic, this game can provide a good atmosphere. Not the portion based on story (it's bad for the most part), but the environment overall. It does feel creepy, uninviting, depressing. The rooms approach is also quite fitting: most rooms are independent and somewhat unique, even though they do have common traits, which is something that you would expect from a real-life motel.

My main problem is the death mechanic. My first death happened quickly, actually in the very first room, and most of my playthrough was on 2nd try. It was totally fine, but then I died again, because I did not have bandages available after accidentally touching acid (which I did not even realize to be acid until then). Which is fine, although I would prefer a proper health-bar, rather than bleeding out from any little thing.

What I did not like happened after I started 3rd try. While some interactions noticeably changed, to speed up getting through the puzzles, you still needed to do a lot of the same things, some of which still triggered monsters to spawn, while there seemed to be fewer bandages around. Which for me resulted in another death, when a monster suddenly appeared in not so good a spot and I was not able to shoot it in time due to reload: it nicked me, which resulted in my bleeding out. That's not to mention more monsters on walls that essentially slowed you down.

4th try turned out to be even worse, because there were even more monsters now, and you had to use 3 or 4 bullets right in the very first room. I mean the "had to" part: without it it you could not progress. When I walked out of the room and saw monsters roaming around, I was now completely discouraged, and did not continue further.

My problem with this mechanic overall is that you were punished for every death not just with the need to redo all the things again, even though slightly differently, but also by increased difficulty. And, yes, of course, the roaming monsters can be avoided by sneaking past them, but when you have to redo things, you naturally want to redo them faster (changes to rooms do help with that) and more monsters with more instances, where you need to sneak, work against that.

Considering the size of the environment here, considering that it's not that interesting, even though atmospheric, this killed my personal motivation. Since [most of] the rooms are isolated, I would have preferred that cleared rooms would not spawn any monsters at all, or that you had more items lying around to help you balance things out. Or maybe upgrade the gun with each death, so that you need to use less bullets, because 5-6 bullets for the roaming monsters, who move relatively fast - is a lot in this game, when you can literally die from picking up a pot.

As such, even though I like the atmosphere and the environment changes with each death, making the content less stale, I do not like the balancing, and the story is also so-so. Since I got it at a discount for 6 euros, I would not say I necessarily regret the purchase, but if I got it for full price of 20 euros - I would have regretted that a lot, especially, since in the end it should be like 2 hours of gametime. I would recommend trying it out when there is a discount to get for 5 euros or less, but otherwise - watch a walkthrough instead.

I really liked the previous Tales from the Borderlands game. It was not perfect, same as any TellTale game really, but it was fun. It gripped you from the very start and did not let go till the very end. It had just the right amount of insanity and ridiculousness to keep you reminded, that this is a Borderlands game, but had enough good narrative for it to be... Somewhat realistic, I guess? Or maybe just "human"?

This one, though... It's atrocious. It's beginning is sooooo bad from narrative perspective, that it took me literally a minute to know, that I won't be playing it, but I still tried. I hoped, maybe it's just 1 character which is being over-the-top and stupid (despite being a scientist), and other are better, but... No. They are not. Frigging TIMM-E robot in the first sequence was way more consistent, grounded and believable than any other human I've seen within like 40 minutes.

I understand this is supposed to be a comedy, same as with all other Borderlands games, but people do not talk like that. They are not that aimless and pointless in the world they live in. At least, not when you want them to be main characters. Even if you want them to be "underdogs". People like underdogs, but they like them, when they have something to like them for. These characters do not. Or maybe they do, but there is not even a glimpse of that during their introductions, and there is no action happening, which could explain the delay of us seeing those qualities (like in the previous game).

I am glad I got this for only like 3 or 4 euros, but I would not mind getting those back. Sadly, 2 weeks has passed a long while ago.

This is exactly how things happened, Russian history books never lie.

In all seriousness, though, I would not mind a proper action RPG based on this or at least in the same setting. I mean, theoretically, you could even add more NPC and dialogues to an existing game, but I would prefer a relatively big world, where you can explore stuff, and perhaps even explore the culture of the Lizards among other things.
Actually, back in 2020 I had some notes inspired by https://farfargames.com/ which were based on Kiev's Rus mythology and real-life geography. It had "nonhumans", so they could be replaced by Lizards, I guess. Notes can be found on https://www.simbiat.dev/talks/threads/395/ if anyone is interested (in Russian).

I really tried to see what other see in this game, but I could not. It's just plain boring, visually glitchy and absolutely not funny. Unless you think that everyone repeating "stupid", "garbage", "moron", "idiot" and the like is funny. It also has quite a few graphical glitches, especially with lighting, which kill any attempt at immersion. If it was made by 1 person, maybe it could be considered a good attempt, but, from what I understand, it was not one person, so... Anyway, even though I was intrigued at the start, I was not able to get to the end, because quite soon I just lost any kind of enjoyment from the game.

"The Chant" is like if "Resident Evil" had a child with "The Stranger Things". And maybe if that child was a bit sickly.

The basics of the gameplay is walking around collecting stuff in order to open some door (mostly literal, but sometimes metaphorical) while also protecting yourself from weird creatures, which seem somewhat plant-based, but nonetheless evil. Unlike "Resident Evil" you have not guns at all, but you can collect different good plants to craft various types of besoms, that you use to ward of those evil plants by literally wiping them to death. In addition you can collect some salts and oils, that you can through, and another type of salt, that you use to improve your stats and learn passive skills.

The skills do make surviving quite a bit easier, especially considering limited amount of resources: both throwables and melee weapons "break" or otherwise expire, and most monsters are relatively tough, with some being really tough (although in case of bosses you normally do have way to replenish your resources). On the other hand most enemies are quite stupid, so in most cases you just dodge (which can feel weird at times, but maybe that's for the sake of realism, since you are not playing as a real fighter), hit a couple of times, dodge again.

So while gameplay does not really introduce anything new, it is quite solid, especially paired with quite good level design, which provides just the right amount of freedom and nooks and crannies to explore, while maintaining your progression pace. The story, though...

It's not bad per say. The beginning is especially good, it really hooks you in, but when the failed ritual happens... A lot of things feel rushed. It does make some sense considering the circumstances, but it feels like everyone becomes kind of ok (even if a bit insane) with all of the crazy plants roaming around. That does not make any sense, because technically only one person is supposed to be somewhat knowledgeable, but even that person behaves worse than a child with his character overall being very poorly developed.

I think the main problem was that the first chapter was very short and it pushed you into the craziness too fast and did not really allow you to get to know the people around you. Yes, you can gather various notes afterwards, that do expand on the characters somewhat, but it's not enough. It would have been better if 1st ritual worked fine and only thing that changed was Jess (protagonist) started seeing things, that she would consider hallucinations or something like that. And then 2nd ritual fails and you get everything else. Although this would not have saved us from DLC ending, which does not fit the established rules of this world in any way.

Another complaint from my side is voice acting: in a lot of cases actors are underplaying, and the low quality of some voice lines does not help. In fact, to my ears all women in the game sound almost Identical to Jess, even when they are talking with each other and you actually see who is talking. That is worsened by the fact that facial animations, on the contrary, overplay the emotions, which sometimes ruins the atmosphere entirely: so much that even really good soundtrack did not help in those moments.

But despite the bad things, I still did enjoy my time with the game. From what I understand this is the first game from "Brass Token", and if that's the case - this is a very good introduction, and I really wish them success with future releases. I think if you do like "Resident Evil" like games or worlds with "evil plants" - you will probably enjoy it, too, even if you buy it at full price.