Tunnet

Game supposed to be spooky and scary. Spend 4 hours trying to optimize my network. Great game. I have no idea what the game is. LOL I turned it into an idle game. LOL

Perfect? No. Unique, special, strange? Absolutely. This is a game you play to experience the breadth of what is possible in gaming, and it does things beautifully, strangely, and thought provokingly. The feeling of discovering this game, the first few hours, are special enough to recommend this game even if I think this might not satisfy most in a longer playthrough. You will experience something strange, something wonderful, something different. ## Spoilery postscript below - I really think this game is best played without knowing anything about it, though! ## (And just to get slightly more specific without throwing spoilers into the 'main' review: I think the fundamental game mechanic is almost too simple to make the game super compelling. Networking and all is a deeply cool concept for a game, but the in-game manual being stuff you pick up as you go along, and it being a little finicky to phyiscally place/move stuff around, leads to a little more friction than such simple mechanics can justify. It's easy to inadvertently create chaos-spaghetti, and there are very few tools for helping simplify it. Things like the cable colors help, but there are no hints in game as to methods to use them to help simplify things. This results in a wonderful feel to the game during the discovery period, where you're figuring things out, and that stage alone makes Tunnet a hugely worthwhile experience. But, as things move forward, as you need to build 'infrastructure', these small points of friction add up as your network gets more complex and harder to handle, meaning it's a lot more work to achieve much less satisfying goals. I intend to keep playing, and admire this game very much for its inventiveness, atmosphere, and unique way of doing things. However, I do also have to be honest - there are shortcomings here. No game is perfect, though, and Tunnet's shortcomings just mean that for most players, I think this is something to play over a single weekend, enjoy, and probably leave unfinished. But that's okay. Some games are best in shorter visits!)

An atmospheric exploration and networking game where you build a network to reconnect a subterranean community of robots. You spend your time locating nodes, creating networks, and trying to connect users and servers to where they need to be connected with the limited resources at your disposal. Tunnet shares the low-poly aesthetic of many indie horror titles, but largely shuns the adrenaline-soaked horror approach for a more measured and creeping sense of isolation and dread. I personally found the game genuinely unnerving at times. (To be clear, there are *some* jumpscare-esque moments, and a few enemies that stalk you, but the majority of the experience isn't focused on them.) At the time of this review, Tunnet is priced at $5.99 US, and is a complete steal for the experience you receive. If anything I've mentioned here is even of passing interest to you, do yourself a favor and pick this one up. It's worth it.

This was fun, if you’re not aggressively obsessed about *P E A K E F F I C I E N C Y* like I am you might not get as much enjoyment about routing and rerouting everything, but it was easy to just lose time to mapping out and laying down my network.

Very good, unique kind of puzzle that mixes atmospheric horror and automation.

Clunky movement and the overall networking aspect is gamified in a not so fun way.

Really good game. You can get a lot of mileage out of it considering how cheap it is. The networking aspect of the game isn't so advanced and there is no messing around with terminals in this game if that's waht you're looking for. This is all about the process of exploring and digging your path through the map to eventually connect everything, using the basic tools you have to optimize it. There's a number of NPCs on the map offering light quest and some story. The spooky bosses can be turned off i believe but they are not hard to deal with with some observation. The game is finished and mostly bug free, would love to see more of it in the future either a sequel or something different.