This game really could have used another refinement pass for bugs, UI design, and overall experience.
If this was released in 2000 or even 2010, it would have been an excellent point & click adventure game with Beneath a Steel Sky or Space Quest vibes, minus the comedy. As it stands, it is a pretty decent adventure game from a story and high level design perspective, but the lack of polish that many other titles offer prevents me from recommending it. For example:
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[*] I encountered two game breaking bugs that required reverting to a save game and replaying a good amount. This is why I can't recommend it. I'll change this in the unlikely event that I find out they are fixed.
[*] The inventory panel enlarges on mouseover, so there's no cursor precision - you have to chase the item you're trying to select with the pointer. Old items are rarely cleared from the inventory, and there are redundant items, plus gaps in the slots, and as a result, you have to constantly scroll the inventory panel, which all feels like the UI getting in the way of the immersion. In later stages of the game, there's a design hack where the inventory is reused for actions involving your MAC (sidekick robot), which suggests a UI overhaul was warranted to logically standardise and demarcate examine, talk, and action verbs.
[*] There's some other weird UI design choices like mouseover to examine hotspots, but the text appears at the top of the screen, so you have to look in two places at once, which feels unnatural. This appears to have been a compromise to have click-free examine option without flooding the screen with text, but like the inventory UI design, it's non standard and doesn't work all that well. You can get a clue on what to do next by hovering over the player character, which is vaguely logical but not really (there's also a progressive hint system which works very well). I should mention here that the whole game is not voice acted - just the spoken lines, which I actually prefer, but you may not.
[*] The player character and your sidekick block hotspots that they stand in front of. You can't click through the characters at the hotspot behind them, like in most adventure games, meaning you have to cancel your inventory selection, move the character, then select from inventory again, before you can do what you were trying to do. This wouldn't be so bad except it is compounded by the aforementioned inventory issues.
[*] The ship's computer dialogue menus are too repetitive and too many levels deep. For example, it's three levels deep to do the most common action, which is matching the cabin pressure to outside pressure, and then lowering the ramp. It's just tedious to have to keep doing this, going through multiple dialogue lines, animation, and sound fx each time, as well as having to enter and exit the 3 levels of menus each time. I found myself hovering the cursor over where I had learned the next dialogue option would appear, which is again the UI getting in the way of the gameplay.
[*] Some animations are tedious, like every time the player character exits the cockpit, which is extremely often, you have to wait for him to take several steps forward before you regain control. There are a lot of redundant, transitional areas that should only have been shown once, and transitional cutscenes (that you can skip, but there can still be up to four of these in succession).
[*] Some areas are just slow and tedious, like the first fuse puzzle involves a lot of backtracking just to experience the same puzzle repeatedly, and this sequence generally feels boring and redundant. I almost uninstalled right there. But just in case you weren't annoyed the first time, you get to experience the same puzzle again near the end of the game! Speaking of later in the game, you have to repeatedly use your ID card to open doors and elevators, which combined with the poor inventory UX makes it feel like a chore that could have been automated after the first instance or two. When doing this fuse juggling thing, you have to get your sidekick to hold the door, but annoyingly, he proceeds to hold every door you encounter and he is always just off-screen making it tedious to cancel this command.
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These all feel a bit nickpicky, but it's the persistent lack of streamlining that adds up to something big. I have used the word tedious an awful lot in this review, but the game does have some counter measures, like the ability to skip cutscenes, and the ability to fast walk with double click.
Besides UX issues, the trailer pretty much reveals the whole story, and then the game ends abruptly. If you can live with these issues, it's still a great game, I just wouldn't recommend it in the 2020's due to being spoiled by more polished adventure game choices with deeper storytelling.
