Moderately and quite fairly priced piece of art with, unfortunately, little interesting gameplay. You play this mostly for the story, then you will never touch it again, because it has almost 0 replay value besides some added difficulty, which almost never comes into play, since you can manage your meters quite easily, all things considered.
So, what is it? Well, it's a narrated board game for the most part. I could see this working with some changes as an actual board game, players having to do various tasks to cooperate ... or oppose one another, but that's besides the point.
You have 4 characters, each with 4 meters (wounds, hunger, sleep, sanity), each requiring different items to alleviate. If you're sleepy, you sleep, duh (and all 4 characters can do that simultaneously), if you're hungry, you need to hunt, cook, then eat, if you're wounded you need to scavenge, then craft healing tonics, and if you're going insane, a nice swig of moonshine does the trick, lol. The meters go down to 0 with each treatment, so it's not necessary to do something until you get to the negative effects.
Each character has several stats that are needed to complete various tasks around the house. Hawke is good at hunting, digging, etc., Vitali is good at reading, and so on. Eventually, however, all characters will be upgraded, and their stats are all raised to 3. I wish there was more to it, though. It's a pretty boring system. It would be interesting if you could actually specialize your characters. To complete tasks you will often also need "support items", which are found or crafted, etc.
Look, you shuffle around items and press pause ... A LOT. Then you watch meters go up and bars go down. Then you do some reading, because there is NO voice acting in the game, sadly. And that is the game. You do that for 8 chapters, each introducing some new elements and opening up the board more and more. It's not rocket science, but it's decent, and the story's decent, albeit not very surprising for anyone who ever read anything of HP Lovecraft. While it's not that exact mythos (at least I've never heard of Nibiru before), it's pretty much a carbon copy of that style of horror writing, if less sophisticated.
Now, what did I NOT like? Mr. Tubbs always being in a spot he's not supposed to be, making you wait ages for him to move, so you can use that field again. I know that's the point of this random element, but I wish there was a way to get him to move, maybe with a crafted item. Or, jeez, just shooing him away, it's a cat!
A task fails when a timed supply item times out before the task's end. Since it is not quite clear how long a task takes exactly, you could waste the entire time, because the raven disappeared 0.1 seconds too early ...
Item management becomes a chore later on. There are soooo many items you need to shuffle around. I don't know why the "rusty shovel" only finds higher tier items from the "simple shovel", same with many other items, but not all?! That was frustrating. Since there is no in-game way of tracking which item can produce what outcome, you basically have to either be really good at remembering or write that ♥♥♥♥ down by hand ... or waste a lot of time and do everything trial by error. You need the more basic items to produce some support items, and you need to combine those support items later on.
Upgrading the permanent support items is also a bit of a chore, as are the 7 point tasks that require combined support items, which just increases the amount of work you have to do to stupid levels. Luckily, you don't need them TOO often, but still, I could have done without that.
Other than that, fine game if you like that sort of gameplay.
