Playtime: 9 Hours (Across 1 and a half playthroughs)
Score: 8/10
What an experience! So this game always looked interesting to me, being heavily inspired by the works of H.R. Giger who I'm a huge fan of his work on the Alien franchise, so this game seemed right up my alley. So I finally checked it out on Gamepass (while I wait for Starfield) and I have a lot to say.
The main selling point of this game is the art style with its very organic and sci fi like imagery. The places you explore just look drop dead gorgerous and its definitely a game where I stopped to take in the scenery from time to time. This extends to the enemies you fight which all look nightmarish in their design and to the weapons you use which all have an organic design to them. It feels like a truly lived in and fallen civilization and I love it. The music and sound design also a do a great job for the games atmosphere. The game itself isn't very scary per say but its definitely got a mood and vibe to it. It can appear very blurry at first so I recommend turning off motion blur (which I always do in games) and turn up the sharpness to make the look very crisp.
Gameplay is broken up into puzzle solving, exploration and combat. The puzzles I thought were quite fun and clever. While some I was able to solve on my own, others requires a lot more brain power in how to solve it. Exploration can be cool mainly for the games art design as I mentioned previously. You don't get any direction at the beginning but after a while you learn that its pretty much you interacting with consoles to open doors, operate heavy machinery or solve puzzles. And they clearly label what consoles you can interact with now or later, so finding your way around is pretty seemless. I also love how the game has no HUD expect for when you aim your weapon, which allowed me to get immersed more easily.
Then we get to combat which I'm a bit mixed on. While the weapons themselves are very cool looking and fun to use (except for the tool gun) the balancing of combat isn't always the best. In the beginning you just have the tool gun which shoots out a phallic like object that you need to use to insert (oh yes you heard me) into consoles to open doors. In combat you can hit enemies with it and if you hit the glory hole (I'm full of puns today), you can do a quick take down animation. This is all fine on paper but the the tool gun can only fire once or twice before it needs to recharge to which you are open to attacks from the enemy and you are very weak and can die easily. The strategy I used was hit the enemies a couple of times then run away while it recharges, but even this became ineffective because the games loves to throw groups of enemies at you. The other guns are more effective but are slow firing and your ammo supply is pretty limited in this game. In the end I just ended up installing mods that increased how many shots I got with the tool gun and increased the overall ammo supply to make the games combat more bareable. This wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things when I learned the enemy patterns and came up with strategy's to beat them but in the beginning it was very frustrating.
As for the story, its a lot easier to follow then what I was expecting, but it does lack a lot of context as to what's going on. You get a basic idea about how your character got into this mess, but thats about it and the stuff that happens to you on your journey is simple enough to interpret up until the ending, which is a bit more confusing but I have an idea in my head about what it meant. There are no audio daries, dialogue exhanges or notes to pick up, so the only real storytelling the game has is envorimental which I can appreciate and I like games that don't spoon feed you answers.
As for performance, the game ran very smooth for me and I never had too many issues aside from frame drops that lasted a second before going back to 60fps, so all good there. I had heard this game was very buggy, but I personally only ran into one bug where I was walking down a corridor and a cut scene was suppose to trigger but it didn't and my character was frozen in place. I was able to fix this by reloading my checkpoint and I was able to trigger the cut scene with no issue. I didn't mind the saving system, but I do recommend checking your save files playtime to see if it has advanced whenever you solve a puzzle, pick up an item etc..as the game doesn't really tell you when it saves.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game and its a nice short survival horror game to play through. I do recommend watching reviews and if you have gamepass, maybe play it that way as I don't think this game will be for everyone. But as for me I got everything I wanted out of it!!
All Games Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/
Score: 8/10
What an experience! So this game always looked interesting to me, being heavily inspired by the works of H.R. Giger who I'm a huge fan of his work on the Alien franchise, so this game seemed right up my alley. So I finally checked it out on Gamepass (while I wait for Starfield) and I have a lot to say.
The main selling point of this game is the art style with its very organic and sci fi like imagery. The places you explore just look drop dead gorgerous and its definitely a game where I stopped to take in the scenery from time to time. This extends to the enemies you fight which all look nightmarish in their design and to the weapons you use which all have an organic design to them. It feels like a truly lived in and fallen civilization and I love it. The music and sound design also a do a great job for the games atmosphere. The game itself isn't very scary per say but its definitely got a mood and vibe to it. It can appear very blurry at first so I recommend turning off motion blur (which I always do in games) and turn up the sharpness to make the look very crisp.
Gameplay is broken up into puzzle solving, exploration and combat. The puzzles I thought were quite fun and clever. While some I was able to solve on my own, others requires a lot more brain power in how to solve it. Exploration can be cool mainly for the games art design as I mentioned previously. You don't get any direction at the beginning but after a while you learn that its pretty much you interacting with consoles to open doors, operate heavy machinery or solve puzzles. And they clearly label what consoles you can interact with now or later, so finding your way around is pretty seemless. I also love how the game has no HUD expect for when you aim your weapon, which allowed me to get immersed more easily.
Then we get to combat which I'm a bit mixed on. While the weapons themselves are very cool looking and fun to use (except for the tool gun) the balancing of combat isn't always the best. In the beginning you just have the tool gun which shoots out a phallic like object that you need to use to insert (oh yes you heard me) into consoles to open doors. In combat you can hit enemies with it and if you hit the glory hole (I'm full of puns today), you can do a quick take down animation. This is all fine on paper but the the tool gun can only fire once or twice before it needs to recharge to which you are open to attacks from the enemy and you are very weak and can die easily. The strategy I used was hit the enemies a couple of times then run away while it recharges, but even this became ineffective because the games loves to throw groups of enemies at you. The other guns are more effective but are slow firing and your ammo supply is pretty limited in this game. In the end I just ended up installing mods that increased how many shots I got with the tool gun and increased the overall ammo supply to make the games combat more bareable. This wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things when I learned the enemy patterns and came up with strategy's to beat them but in the beginning it was very frustrating.
As for the story, its a lot easier to follow then what I was expecting, but it does lack a lot of context as to what's going on. You get a basic idea about how your character got into this mess, but thats about it and the stuff that happens to you on your journey is simple enough to interpret up until the ending, which is a bit more confusing but I have an idea in my head about what it meant. There are no audio daries, dialogue exhanges or notes to pick up, so the only real storytelling the game has is envorimental which I can appreciate and I like games that don't spoon feed you answers.
As for performance, the game ran very smooth for me and I never had too many issues aside from frame drops that lasted a second before going back to 60fps, so all good there. I had heard this game was very buggy, but I personally only ran into one bug where I was walking down a corridor and a cut scene was suppose to trigger but it didn't and my character was frozen in place. I was able to fix this by reloading my checkpoint and I was able to trigger the cut scene with no issue. I didn't mind the saving system, but I do recommend checking your save files playtime to see if it has advanced whenever you solve a puzzle, pick up an item etc..as the game doesn't really tell you when it saves.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game and its a nice short survival horror game to play through. I do recommend watching reviews and if you have gamepass, maybe play it that way as I don't think this game will be for everyone. But as for me I got everything I wanted out of it!!
All Games Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/