There are minor spoilers in this review - nothing major.
I had this in my backlog for years and was really looking forward to playing it, given how many great reviews it had.
The game, regretfully, turned out to be an immense disappointment.
First, the level design and visual narrative.
The game presents itself as serious, realistic science fiction - immersive and grounded.
At the same time, the environment looks silly and implausible. The space station has large, empty hallways, with water barrels randomly placed around. The protagonist wakes up from cryosleep already wearing her space suit. A few minutes later, she flies to a nearby moon - without changing, eating, or making any sort of preparation.
The rare areas that aren’t puzzle rooms are littered with paper notes scattered everywhere. Almost all of them exist purely for exposition or shock value, with no logical reason to be there.
There’s a somewhat plausible explanation for the puzzle rooms themselves (though it’s a stretch if you think about it), but there are also secret puzzle rooms whose existence makes absolutely no sense within the story. They’re nonsensical.
Overall, the level design and narrative do a very poor job of keeping the player immersed.
Second, the actual gameplay - the puzzles.
The game consists of 70 regular puzzle rooms and 7 optional ones. The puzzles are trivial: out of 77 in total, maybe 8 took me longer than a couple of minutes to solve. Some rooms can hardly be called puzzles at all - they simply ask you to move one or two objects from point A to point B.
Rarely, a puzzle requires some out-of-the-box thinking, but even then, once you grasp the gimmick, it’s over - the idea is never developed or expanded into something more challenging or interesting.
Some puzzles even contain completely unnecessary, skippable rooms because of holes in their design.
It’s simplistic, repetitive, and can’t compare to any 3D puzzle game like The Talos Principle, Antichamber, or Superliminal. However, it might still entertain people who’ve never played a puzzle game before.
There’s also a mechanic that lets you “pick up” random small decorative objects and rotate them, admiring low-poly 3D models with blurry textures. This feature adds nothing to the gameplay; removing it wouldn’t change a thing. Why is it even there?
Finally, the story.
The central plot has potential - I won’t deny that. A competent writer could have turned it into a compelling, thought-provoking narrative.
However, like everything else in this game (aside from the voice acting), it’s executed poorly.
The astronauts (the protagonist included) behave like people who know nothing about mechanics, biology, or programming - we’re talking middle-school-level understanding. They ask dumb questions and make immature, naive statements. They act recklessly and childishly, with zero responsibility, accountability, or logical thinking.
The plot itself has several glaring holes in logic. It would take only a few minutes to fix or at least acknowledge them through dialogue or logs, but the writers don’t even try.
The story is told through conversations between the protagonist and an AI assistant, a few audio recordings, and a handful of emails. The emails convey most of the actual story - but there are only two or three of them. The audio logs have terrible quality, full of static, and aren’t subtitled. They also feel misplaced - half of them supposedly come from locations where they couldn’t have been recorded.
The dialogues are well-acted but painfully simplistic. The protagonist talks with the intellect of a high-school girl rather than an engineer-astronaut, and the exchanges feel artificial. Near the end, the AI starts spouting a string of obvious philosophical fallacies, presented as fragments of profound wisdom.
It’s a bad game with a low budget, a primitive story, and basic puzzles that might keep you busy for about four hours.
I regret buying it and strongly recommend you don’t repeat my mistake. Play The Talos Principle instead - that one is genuinely smart, well-made, and has great puzzles.
