Diana stops by a gas station in the middle of nowhere because her boss wants something to drink. As she pays for the can, a bracelet falls from the display stand, and the store clerk lets her take it for free. It doesn’t look like much, but the note on the table says the bracelet’s stones have some sort of magnetic properties and come from an old mine. But when they continue their drive, the bracelet starts to glow, the sky turns red, and a demon jumps in front of the car.
The next thing you know, you wake up in an old saloon that’s straight out of a Wild West movie, except everything around you has a hellish undertone. There are also monsters outside. Fortunately, you get your first two weapons, a knife and a gun, to take out everything in your path as you try to figure out what’s going on.
Gameplay is all about the first person shooter experience, so everything should be familiar. You move around, jump, and crouch, and mash the mouse button to shoot your gun or swing a knife if you want to save bullets against basic enemies. Sadly, this sounds and should be simple, but design choices get in the way.
The knife will break after it loses its durability, which is visible as a bar next to the weapon. So, you’ll either have to rely on pointless fists that can’t even break wooden objects and deal such pitiful damage that you’ll die before knocking an enemy down, or look for another weapon, such as a rake or shovel. Useful items, such as weapons, ammo, armor, and health packs, don’t stand out from the environment, so you can miss them very easily.
The game is dark, and although you have a strong flashlight, you can’t keep it on all the time because it has to recharge after a while. But it’s not always useful. This is particularly noticeable in the second moon stage, where the metallic environment makes it impossible to spot items because some surfaces stay black no matter what, while others light up.
Speaking of stages, the theme of the game is interesting because it deals with various time periods. So, while you start in the Wild West, you encounter other locations, such as a big greenhouse, an ice world, a space station, and so on. The fun part is that there’s no loading or black screen between the various environments. It’s all one big stage that keeps going and switches to the next theme at specific points.
The environments and themes don’t mesh or combine, so you won’t see both at the same time, but the point where they switch is obvious. As for saving, it’s either done through autosaving, which kicks in after passing a certain point, or through save spots that take the shape of a hospital bed with a red figure sitting on it.
Sadly, the game doesn’t have exciting shooting. It even discourages you from using guns because ammo is incredibly scarce and enemies are plentiful. In fact, it feels more like a survival game where you have to avoid fights and run from enemies instead of blasting everything in front of you. It also doesn’t help that enemies take a lot of bullets to kill, especially the annoying, almost invisible enemies, and come in unlimited numbers until you take out the source, like the alien like creatures that jump into your face and cover the screen. You get other weapons as well, such as a shotgun, but ammo for that is even scarcer and is best saved for something more dangerous, like a boss.
Guns also don’t feel powerful outside of the shotgun, and the starting pistol is worthless against anything because it takes an entire clip to kill one enemy. Although some rare sections have a friendly character who will follow you around and help you kill enemies, they die incredibly fast and take a while to kill even a basic enemy. What’s more, they unlock doors to resources if they manage to survive, which, again, is tough.
This makes the game incredibly hard even on the intended normal difficulty. There are three settings, and the difference is in how much damage you take and how much you heal from health packs. These are collected and used when you want, rather than automatically when picked up, but like everything else, they come in limited supply, so using them needs to be worthwhile.
Stage layouts encourage sticking your nose into places you wouldn’t think of checking to find secret stashes, but this doesn’t fix the problem. The first stage already demonstrates this with several structures and doors that can’t be opened, but the other side reveals loot that tells you there is a way inside. Part of finding secrets involves your character being able to pull herself up when a ledge is within eye level. The second method is that you can carry barrels or something else and create platforms or steps to reach something high, such as a ledge or a roof.
This is taken even further, along with battle encounters, once you gain control over gravity, which lets you grab things and throw them at enemies. There’s a lack of actual force or damage, so the enemy will just stand there when you throw a metal box at it and will only get launched away when you hit it enough times to deplete its invisible health bar. Sadly, this power also means there are puzzles, which are not great.
It starts in the space station, where you have to push and pull platforms. But the power is problematic because of its short range and limited energy supply, which depletes as you use it. It recharges fairly quickly, but the fact that objects in the world you can use the power on aren’t marked in any way means you’ll be experimenting and wasting power. Since the game is dark, you might miss something obvious entirely.
These situations were never easy. The worst was the laser section right after the platforms, where the objective simply says to use them to destroy a blue mass, but there are no visual clues on how to do that. You have no idea what can be interacted with or what can be affected by the power unless you ask in the Steam discussions, like I did. You’re supposed to get clues about this stuff from memos, but they can be easily missed as well.
In the end, the game is weird in a good way, with plenty of unique ideas and no hand holding or visual clues. However, this is also a problem because you often have no idea where to go next or whether the way you’re going is even the right one. Combat is simply not fun and relies too much on throwing things at enemies, which is also not exciting because of the power restrictions. If you’re looking for a shooter, stay away, but if you’re into something that borders on experimental, you can give this one a go at a steep discount, since the asking price is pretty high.
