I've never played Gone Home, but clearly it spawned a trend of “art-directed empty-environment games” that play as slightly interactive audio books. Draugen goes a step further with a motion-captured human companion, but the associated plot twist falls flat. Draugen also does Hellblade one further. It not only over-explains the power of myth that it clumsily wields – it actively attacks it. The desecrated church (with the unsubtle placard “God is not here”) and the stern angel phantasm are products of a tedious, reflexive iconoclasm.

Should've stayed a detective story about a parent and his estranged daughter on a (potentially) haunted island. The whole schizophrenia angle was not developed well and ruined the mystery of the second half.

When will artists learn that some mental illnesses just generally do not work for movie- or videogame narratives. For a good story to work you need some kind of resolution, but you cannot just "fix" schizophrenia, only live with it. This leads to stories being either disingenous about the mental illness (e.g. Edward "learning to accept Bessie isn't real" and "learning to live with his illness") or feeling like an unsatisfying/improper ending (This is most common when these types of twists are used mainly for shock value, and don't add much if anything to the themes of a game).

It's a shame, because the character design, aesthetic, voice acting and character dynamics are all good (though Lissie's dialogue could get grating at times), and deserved a better story attached to it. I've still given it 3 stars because despite my steadily decreasing enthousiasm from act 2 onwards, the first 1.5 hours are pretty fantastic. Unfortunately, the story's weak ending makes me unable to really recommend it to anyone else.

Short, reasonably polished mystery walking sim, whose biggest weakness is its story. Keeping things as vague as possible, the story the game initially seems to be telling is not the one it ends up telling, and for the latter story to have worked, the protagonists would probably need to have been much more fleshed out than they are. Nice outdoor areas and Scandinavian vibes, at least, and some people will probably like the game's twist(s) better than I did; might at least be worth a try if you can get it on sale or in a bundle.

I was briefly following this game's development (ages ago), because "sassy girl detective who gives off gay vibes" sounded like a very promising co-protagonist. In light of that, the end of act 2 certainly left me distraught, but perhaps not for the reasons intended.

Draugen does a great job of embodying you in the worldspace, but the story isn't as tight. The game revolves around two central mysteries. One is a grim, atmospheric tale of a town rotted by a family feud. The other is Silent Hill 2. This second plot majorly brings down the first, not only because it's been done better in a seminal PS2 game, but because your jerk of a protagonist cannot be bothered to care about the first one. (Kinda impressive, considering all the corpses littering the island.) Lissie's claim that they were "brought here to tell [the villagers'] story" is pretty rich, when the game can't even bother to do so.

Really wanted to like it more than I did.

The vibe of the first half felt much more interesting than the second half for me. I loved the sense of mystery so when that gradually faded, I enjoyed it less.

That being said, it's a very well polished walking sim. Lissie and Edward were fun to be around and there's a real great soundtrack here. Everything feels like it has high production values, which is impressive for an indie title.

I'll definitely play whatever's next from Red Thread Games. They've shown here that they understand what makes walking sims fun. I just hope the next game clicks with me a bit more i the story department.