This is a fun game. It has some optimisation issues, but the core loop is enjoyable, and you are often given enough reward for exploring weird, out-of-the-way areas that it feels nice for doing so. Many puzzles are exploration/environment puzzles, "I can see <x>, but how do I GET it?" and this is great, for me.
There are some optimisation and graphics issues, but I can run the game for an entire day and it remains stable, just with some ghosting of blur on the screen. Sometimes the fog can be a bit much and is a little clippy, but it's not unmanageable and, you know, it's in early access.
I rate it a thumbs-down because this is the only way to express a disapproval of shady behaviour. I know this will bring review trolls out (hi! I don't care!), but the reality is that near as I can tell almost _all_ the writing is LLM-generated. Like.. every single journal entry/memento/clip that you come across, and it feels like a decent chunk of the exploratory text, too, is just churned out from an LLM, and at the time of review, they have no AI disclosure.
I am not anti-AI, really. There's things it's very great for, and in general the potential is neat -- though I think writing is not its strong suit, compared to what you get from an actual writer -- but I am anti-deceit, and Steam *specifically* asks developers to disclose this information. They have not.
Sometimes people say that an em-dash is how you can tell that writing is AI, and they do that because they are not writers and do not know how to write. What *is* a tell-tale sign, though, is a certain cadence that all the models as of the time of this review speak in; because LLMs are told to prioritise clarity and impact, they often favour shorter sentences over long ones -- but no writer, nobody who writes creatively for a living, is going to write a game's worth of text that never uses a second clause in any of its sentences. They're just not. Even illiterates do not write and talk like that; people like to use variety in their cadence.
Additionally, the whole thing is rife -- I mean RIFE -- with the, "It's not <x>, but <y>" pattern, which is another enormous tell when seen in proliferation. Good writing can indeed use this pattern (that's why the LLM does it, because it was trained on good writing), but not every other paragraph in every single form of text in the game.
Look. I get it. It's expensive to hire a writer! You're in EA! You'll just go back and hire a writer for the text later (you won't; any 'stopgap' measure becomes permanent after a point)! But game development is baking, it is not cooking.
Both baking and cooking are an amalgamation of ingredients put together for an end result. But when you ♥♥♥♥ up cooking, you can just not eat that part. I can just not eat the burnt crust, or the side dish, or I can pick out the banana or the peppers or whatever. But when you're baking, it is everything coming together for a whole singular product. You have a nice cake here, truly. So please stop making the topping out of faeces.
Cheers.
