I wanted to like this more, it starts out so well. There's a beautiful retro 3D style that emulates the FMVs of the late 90s when everyone was just so excited to see 3D renders, and you're thrown into this industrial sci-fi horror scenario. It has some nice tweaks on the graphic adventure format, letting you right click to see where every interactable is, and putting all puzzles & items on dedicated zoomed in interaction shots so it's hard to miss the important stuff. And yet, I still wound up in the same rut as the old games: completely unable to understand the game's logic.
"This thermite will eat through anything, EVEN underwater", the game tells me. Fantastic. I've gone on a long quest to assemble the thermite, and finally, it will solve the puzzle I've been stuck on for ages: blasting through the hull of an old ship to grant me access to the next area. Except. It doesn't. The characters continue to gibber about how great the thermite is, but whenever I try and rub it on the hull it stubbornly refuses to work. Elsewhere, I line up the panels in an image puzzle and clone a demonic shrimp. "Perfect," the characters announce. "It's just like the old one. This is exactly what we need." I have no idea why we need this shrimp.
Most of all, it feels like the story just isn't unfolding in a very satisfying way. There are a lot of well written log entries - naturally just lying around everywhere - which tell the story of a doomed drilling operation. At first they're fascinating, but they start to become repetitive without progressing anything. Rather than drawing closer to the point, each one of them reads more or less like "I hate working for Devil Incorporated. They forced my mum to mine asteroids to pay off my medical debt AND they won't let me eat the glowing green slime I found at the bottom of the sea. Well joke's on them, I'm eating it anyway!!!" There's a lot of tantalising world building to do with some sort of demonic religious/corporate overlord that took over the world, but I got the sense that this was set dressing that the game didn't want to explain. It's unfortunate, because it's such a big juicy idea that it totally distracts from the main story. I don't care at all about the magic mushrooms on the sea floor, I want to know about Cayne's Reign!
Alas!
Nothing but praise for Moses, however. He is too pure for this world.
"This thermite will eat through anything, EVEN underwater", the game tells me. Fantastic. I've gone on a long quest to assemble the thermite, and finally, it will solve the puzzle I've been stuck on for ages: blasting through the hull of an old ship to grant me access to the next area. Except. It doesn't. The characters continue to gibber about how great the thermite is, but whenever I try and rub it on the hull it stubbornly refuses to work. Elsewhere, I line up the panels in an image puzzle and clone a demonic shrimp. "Perfect," the characters announce. "It's just like the old one. This is exactly what we need." I have no idea why we need this shrimp.
Most of all, it feels like the story just isn't unfolding in a very satisfying way. There are a lot of well written log entries - naturally just lying around everywhere - which tell the story of a doomed drilling operation. At first they're fascinating, but they start to become repetitive without progressing anything. Rather than drawing closer to the point, each one of them reads more or less like "I hate working for Devil Incorporated. They forced my mum to mine asteroids to pay off my medical debt AND they won't let me eat the glowing green slime I found at the bottom of the sea. Well joke's on them, I'm eating it anyway!!!" There's a lot of tantalising world building to do with some sort of demonic religious/corporate overlord that took over the world, but I got the sense that this was set dressing that the game didn't want to explain. It's unfortunate, because it's such a big juicy idea that it totally distracts from the main story. I don't care at all about the magic mushrooms on the sea floor, I want to know about Cayne's Reign!
Alas!
Nothing but praise for Moses, however. He is too pure for this world.