I overall recommend this game, but it wasn't what I think it was.
Some Gameplay Spoilers Ahead.
[spoiler]
I'll explain the game's strongest aspects and how they fall short in some regards.
- Interconnected level design, knowledge based progression:
They clearly understand a thing or two about what makes both of those exciting and this is the main reason you'll keep playing towards the end, hands down. Curiosity, wanderlust, a need to uncover every secret, and a sense of accomplishment from having gone through to the final bits and pieces of the map.
The main problem is that the game is VERY limiting with the seed items that you need to REALLY explore everywhere you can. As far as I know you can only get two per run, and most times you need one for a specific room that works as a hub of sorts. They literally could put an unlimited vending machine of those items somewhere hard to reach but obvious once you have the proper knowledge, and we'd be golden.
It is true that the tedium of this is very much reduced by getting some hidden phone numbers, but still you need to get the phone first and that requires a pesky and repetitive trek throughout the first 2 areas, where you get the gun, the phone, some bullets and heals, do THE ONLY mandatory jumping room in the game, where you need to wait for your stamina to refill between jumps since they consume ALL your stamina, and you can only jump after you get your first 4 bars of stamina. I get this being done so the AI can even catch up to you, but make it at least so we have at least two jumps (make it consume 50% stamina) instead of one, since now you have a very HIGH chance of getting hit by the enemies up there, that would help so much with the pace of every jump in the game. That and having to wait between shots after shooting a wall feels bad too. There's better more organic ways to make the survival horror scary other than making you wait a million years!
- Puzzles:
The puzzles in it are very well implemented and very much tied to the knowledge based progression, which at least for me, elevate them to a point. There's like three types of puzzle in the whole game, which is not bad.
Let's call them "phone" puzzles "navigation" puzzles and these ascii puzzles where you need to make a line from the start spot with your mouse and onto an "end" position, that I like to call the "The Witness" puzzles. But the problem itself arises when you look at how many puzzles are there of each in the whole game.
The "The Witness" puzzles are ONLY FOUR and ONE OF THEM is a phone puzzle!
The phone puzzles are subdivided on their own in my mind, but let's just say there's and I'm being generous, like 10 of them in there.
The navigation puzzles are definitely the most common, since it's basically "hey see that place? how do you get there?" since some of them require prior knowledge of how the world and items work, but it's also where the game feels both the most interesting and the most incomplete, once the game opens up wholly to you, there's a ton of places where you need the seed items to go, only to find there was nothing and your puzzle try just ended and you have to start the run from scratch.
- Atmosphere. The game is very eerie and can get scary specially if there's no time to reload and you have to put distance between you and monsters fast. Definitely sets a mood, and then sets out to break your assumptions of it, which is always a nice change of pace.
My biggest gripe with it is the music. It feels like it's trying to homage traditional survival horror AND dungeon crawlers and that's good. But I feel like you can't do this if there isn't some more melodic music sprinkled throughout that makes you reflect on your journey.
There's only ONE instance of this, and it's part of why I think it's pretty cool, but even then it didn't evolve the melody in any meaningful way that made the slog through that particular level worth it for me, and that one's a real slog, since there's little to no indication of something hidden in the main maze or the bottom of the level.
As you slog through the first levels over and over, in the same ways, grabbing everything you need so as to make it faster, not having something catchy like in a King's Field game or a cool chilling melody like those Silent Hill uses makes it actively more boring.
Not saying what's there is bad, I think they could make it just a tad louder, maybe even change the music after you hit certain global game triggers, like Zelda or Dark Souls does. Which are amazing dungeon crawlers in their own right.
Spoiler Conclusion:
In the end, there's just not enough stuff out there to justify me bothering with turning every stone upside down, not as of now. No clear indication of remaining puzzle pieces, except for certain entities that seem like a BIG, RED herring, no more nothing. You can absolutely beat the game and keep on exploring trying to find the solution to getting somewhere you had your eyes on for a while, and it turns out there was nothing there! The overarching pieces themselves seem to hint at something more, but it's unclear if it refers one of the endings we already found or what.
I went with the expectation of a big, overarching, world altering secret, AT LEAST.
I went with the expectation of at least it being comparable to something like Blue Prince, but without the whole dumb RNG, in the sense of the main loop being the knowledge based unraveling of many different narrative/gameplay leads. And by the end with DEMON DUST I am left with no leads, a need for more puzzles and interesting places to explore with hopefully a lot less tedium. I want to say that the only reasons my expectations of the game crashed with the reality, is because it actually did a great job setting up the progression systems that it sucks there's no big payoff for learning them and applying them throughout other than the "good" ending we found until now that looks like clockwork orange brainwash footage.
[/spoiler]
No Spoiler Conclusion:
Blue Prince or The Witness adyacent this is not. Not as far as I got at least, although it has some of the same colours in terms of how they decided to paint with gameplay. I have walked through all the map that I could reach, and after only finding what seems are pieces of what seems like environmental storytelling and not much more, I am left with no leads to follow, no big overarching puzzle box mystery to solve.
For a puzzle game, while the puzzles that are there are indeed well implemented, it has too few non-exploration puzzles, for a survival horror game it doesn't quiiiite entirely nail the atmosphere or the movement mechanics, and for a dungeon crawler, it absolutely nails the level design for the biggest part of the game, but after the end, I at least, can't be bothered to keep trying to explore further, it's too much of a hassle.
Final Thoughts:
I'm not saying it's not a complete game because it feels complete upon the first broad inspection, but the closer you were looking, the more you were paying attention, the more it feels like there should be more and I just simply couldn't find it. I want to say that the main reason my expectations of the game crashed with the reality of it, is because they actually did a great job setting up the knowledge based progression, that it combined with my overall good impressions of the game, and set me up for a bit of dissapointment when I found that there wasn't anything more for me to unravel.
I certainly hope someone proves me wrong in the near future, and there actually was something else!
I certainly liked the game enough to hop back in to check out if the community finds something new.
Cheers!
