I'm not upset that I decided to give this game a chance, after all, its presentation (graphics/music) did entertain me. However, it was the actual gameplay and design that completely turned me off here. I have a... feeling that this game is trying to go for that 'so retro' aesthetic, and one of the ways it tries to do that is by not explaining ANYTHING about how you play it. There's a combat system (which I wanna say feels rare for a PNC game?) but like with Middens, I feel like this game is made worse because of it. It's very clunky and unresponsive, and overall does not feel fun to play. There's a 'run' button, but it never seemed to work for me. But the worst part about the combat is that not only is it all random encounters, but battles can occur in any room except the sanctuary and they can happen at any time (even when there's a text box open, which I'll get to later). This, in conjunction with the fact that you get (from what I found) a minimum of two chances to heal yourself in the entire game, means that I found myself trying to move through the caverns as fast as possible in order to not trigger any battles. And this is, of course, in a game where you'd do best if you slowed down and thought about your next move before proceeding. Or quite honestly, a game where you'd want to stop and admire the ambience of a room before proceeding. I know this game isn't much of a looker to most, but the one thing it does do really well is scares and ambience. But ultimately, the reason I quit was not because the game's puzzles were too confusing or two hard, but because I had only one hit's worth of damage, I seemed to be completely out of options to heal myself, and I was not at all interested in trying to do a damageless run of a game where combat was both unavoidable and also poorly programmed.

The game's UI is also quite buggy, especially in regards to the item menu. It's the only on-screen button that you hover over to open instead of clicking, and when it does open, the first item slot appears OVER the button itself. And coincidentally, that's how I discovered how the green scroll heals you. Maybe that's a good thing, though, because there's not a single other way to figure out what each of the scrolls do before you use them. Like, you hover over the item menu to open it, but you can't hover over items to read what they do? Even a little text blurb would've been nice.

And speaking of text blurbs, the text boxes in this game are very broken. In the intro cutscene, you forward through text by clicking inside the text box. You aren't told this, by the way, you just have to figure it out. However, the very second that gameplay starts, this changes-- text boxes that appear during gameplay auto-scroll. Now, this wouldn't be a problem if not for two things: First, the text box covers like, 2/3rds of the screen, and that's barely an exaggeration. They also open in the very middle of the screen. And clicking on something multiple times causes the text to open multiple times and layer on top of itself. And again, remember, the game opens by teaching you that text is cleared/forwarded by clicking on it. Second, although this is only true of (potentially) one single item in a single room, the text autoscrolls shockingly fast when there's multiple "pages" for it to flip through. You know, a time when you'd actually want to slow down and read everything it says (in this case, a literal lore book you find). And like I mentioned earlier, the text boxes don't auto-clear when in-room events happen, like combat. So you have to wait for the text box to clear before you can really see what's going on, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but is annoying.

Also, as a side, for some reason, despite being a point and click game, the game has a weird reliance on keys for input when clicking would've sufficed? Like, when you go to save, you get a window that pops up with the three save files listed. But you can't just click on 1, 2, or 3. You have to manually press the 1, 2, or 3 keys on your keyboard. I genuinely want to know what the reason for this is, because I feel like it would've been so much better to just... not do that?

But I can't wholeheartedly recommend this unless you're into weird, "trashy", fucked up games or you're looking for some pretty good scares for like, the reasonable 30-45 minutes before giving up like I did.

EDIT:
I wanted to update this review because it's been a few days since I played this and I've been thinking about it. And my thoughts have been both good and bad-- I've really come to appreciate a lot of the game's setpieces and environments, but knowing that, it's also really disappointed me how rough around the edges this game really is. I want to finish this game, I really do, but because I've run out of places to heal my character (and this game's battle system is broken and unkind), I'd either have to restart from the beginning and try to avoid as much damage as possible OR try to play from where I'm at and not take any more damage. Both of which seem nigh impossible. I'm going to watch a playthrough soon and then hop into the sequel and just pray that it has better design.