A beautiful game with striking visuals, mixed perspectives, great directing, excellent sound design, and a bit challenging to top it off.
And while it certainly passes the Vibe Check and is the exact type of graphics that appeals to me, a gamer, I just couldn’t click with it in the end—literally. It’s a great game and one I recommend, but your mileage will vary WILDLY on the story, how it’s presented, and what it ultimately leads up to.
I simply didn’t understand what the hell was going on nor why I should care, period. I barely even know the name of who I’m playing until an NPC finally said it. The mix of German and Chinese for a sort of… I suppose aesthetic choice also doesn’t help, as there are key moments in cutscenes that aren’t in English. Yes, to my ignorant semi-monolingual brain it LOOKS cool, but I’d’ve rather understood what was literally being said over pure aesthetics. My feelings eventually pivoted to it being too pretentious.
And to that end, what cutscenes there were made no sense to the average player, not unless you were a YouTube video game lore analyzer like VatiVidya whose actual livelihood depends on it. They chose the FromSoft method of story telling, but forgot that it was a story-centric survival horror game and not a gameplay-centric action RPG. Even Silent Hill gives you some fucked up idea of what’s going on some times.
Simply put, 10 hours is what it took for me to beat it, but it would take another 10+ just to figure out what’s going on—and that’s not taking into account the multiple endings, which was visually great but who the hell is that and why did any of it happen?! I swear I’m not that dumb, please make it make sense!
To sum up, it’s a visually incredible, creepy, challenging indie horror game worth your time. And while I personally love vague storytelling, it was far too opaque for my taste—almost like the famous novel Roadside Picnic, with cool ideas but no central thread to latch onto.
I still recommend it, I enjoyed a great deal of it, but was let down by the Who, What, and Why.
And while it certainly passes the Vibe Check and is the exact type of graphics that appeals to me, a gamer, I just couldn’t click with it in the end—literally. It’s a great game and one I recommend, but your mileage will vary WILDLY on the story, how it’s presented, and what it ultimately leads up to.
I simply didn’t understand what the hell was going on nor why I should care, period. I barely even know the name of who I’m playing until an NPC finally said it. The mix of German and Chinese for a sort of… I suppose aesthetic choice also doesn’t help, as there are key moments in cutscenes that aren’t in English. Yes, to my ignorant semi-monolingual brain it LOOKS cool, but I’d’ve rather understood what was literally being said over pure aesthetics. My feelings eventually pivoted to it being too pretentious.
And to that end, what cutscenes there were made no sense to the average player, not unless you were a YouTube video game lore analyzer like VatiVidya whose actual livelihood depends on it. They chose the FromSoft method of story telling, but forgot that it was a story-centric survival horror game and not a gameplay-centric action RPG. Even Silent Hill gives you some fucked up idea of what’s going on some times.
Simply put, 10 hours is what it took for me to beat it, but it would take another 10+ just to figure out what’s going on—and that’s not taking into account the multiple endings, which was visually great but who the hell is that and why did any of it happen?! I swear I’m not that dumb, please make it make sense!
To sum up, it’s a visually incredible, creepy, challenging indie horror game worth your time. And while I personally love vague storytelling, it was far too opaque for my taste—almost like the famous novel Roadside Picnic, with cool ideas but no central thread to latch onto.
I still recommend it, I enjoyed a great deal of it, but was let down by the Who, What, and Why.