Finally finished it and really loved it. Puzzles are really well balanced difficulty-wise, the dialogue is cheesy and repetitive in an era-accurate way (but dips into moments of brilliance that I will admit were embraced a little more to replace some of the more "quippy" lines), and the PSX-era aesthetics both serve the game well, and allow for an amount of mystery that some modern horror games have lost.

Be informed: it's an escape room game first and a horror game second. It's about atmosphere and keeping a little journal with combinations and patterns. So it's ideal for me, but won't resonate with all horror fans. It's definitely one of my favorite games of 2023.

While I would have loved for this to be a more traditional survival horror game, what I did play was still pretty marvelous. Loved the creepy tone and atmosphere and thought the puzzles were pretty challenging but reasonable. I did refer to a guide later in the game, though. My patience got the better of me.

Definitely have to tip my hat to the developers for going with first person controls that made the experience ten times better than had they paired the PS1 style graphics with tank controls. I want to see more games like this, please.

I love that we're firmly in the era of PSX throwback aesthetics. This game looks soooo good. The texture work is great and the weird character boiling we used to get in old games has been replicated pretty well. Total eye candy.

I wish the games writing was slightly stronger. We get introduced to a lot of interesting characters throughout but the game doesn't really do much to flesh them out. Alex's dialogue is also just on the wrong side of too quipy for my tastes. And I wouldn't have minded a few twists in the story. Still, it's a fun time! The puzzles are tricky without feeling impossible and they're all very unique and cool. Almost makes me feel like a smarty pants!

The Tartarus Key strikes a near perfect puzzle difficulty for me. I never immediately knew the solution. The puzzle would feel difficult at first. Then, after trying a few things, I would take a moment to think through all the clues in the room again and have my eureka moment where I solve it.
The atmosphere is the real star for me with this one though. It was very reminiscent of Resident Evil 1, finding yourself in a mysterious, creepy mansion with something sinister pulling the strings. Not to mention all the flavor text for the creepy paintings and other grotesque subject matter you can click on that adds so much to the setting and adds to your understanding of the protag's feelings and motivation/thought process.
My main disappointment was that the mansion was not as interconnected as I had hoped. When you enter a room, all you need for that room is in that room. So much so that you can't even access notes and items you gathered from rooms you are not currently in. I would have liked the mansion to feel more like one giant puzzle rather than a series of puzzles, personally.
I wholeheartedly recommend this to fans of this aesthetic and/or genre. It's also at a great price! But I don't think this will wow anyone who isn't already a fan of this stuff.

The main character, Alex, has OD'd on being a millenial and Tartarus Key wants to focus on her alienation. She adapts to the insane circumstances of the cult's escape room groverhaus quickly simply to feel wanted, and to see her labor and education actualized.

But even though there are other characters, they're all cutouts compared to Alex. That's perfectly fine, to be frank, but they're adjuncts to an insipid plot that's just not as interesting as our main character. In the end, it drags her down and the game's themes with it.

The puzzles are fine too.