Voyager-19

Very good. Scary monster.

For a game that is very clearly inspired by Iron Lung and trying to recreate that kind of experience, hell maybe even due to that fact and the higher expectations I had for it, I found myself super underwhelmed by this one. It doesn't show much understanding of what made Szymanski's game work and so while it might have some nice elements, it's an ultimately disappointing and tedious experience. As an example, the main flaw of this game is its ship mechanics. All of your functions run on a separate power system that you need to manually toggle on and off, depending on how much power is available. This is relatively fine while you can have almost if not everything active at once, but the increased menu scrolling and finicking as you go along is a very annoying way of "increasing difficulty". I suppose they had no choice considering they made navigation itself manual, which is a shame because controlling the ship could've been an actually decent mechanical aspect. Your objective is to photograph and record audio for planets and then send your work in, which is quickly turned into a bothersome process as you're forced to repeat the task many times over with lower power. The horror aspects, being any unnatural audio and visuals you capture, take a bit too long to get started and spread themselves way too thin over the course of the game. As a result of everything, it ended up feeling way longer than it actually was. It didn't take me long to stop feeling unnerved and start feeling bored. Your ship interior is also completely useless. You're allowed to look around and it is kind of cool looking, but being able to view your ship doesn't provide anything of use because nothing happens to it. I needed a lot more to be immersed in this experience and make up for the lack of visual information, and they did not help me feel confident in the quiet vacuum of space working for this gameplay style. It's not completely devoid of good things. I did like how the predator disguised itself as a safe planet and do prefer the concept of being pulled in like that while being functionally restricted to the camera to Iron Lung's fish jumpscare, even if the journey to get there was so much worse. The lore and files are fine, there's some nice foreshadowing. I also appreciated how the monitor degrades due to radiation, though it also made files inconvenient to read so yeah. Maybe my final score is a little harsh but this was just a really disappointing game that I only liked less and less as I wrote this. My space-obsessed friend watched me play, and was able to catch when the radio wasn't authentic, so maybe he and other nerds had/would've had a better time with this than I did. However he also got bothered by the inaccuracies present in the game, as well as the missed potential of not using red dwarf systems for atmosphere, so it's a bit of a double-edged sword.