Horace has lovely visuals, a good blend of classical and digital soundtrack, and a fairly good concept for a story. But it lacks that indescribable essence that's behind all good games, the "game feel".

Horace doesn't value your time. At least 50% of the game is unskippable cutscenes. Not a single cutscene is skippable. Horace's voice, which is a synthetic, unchanging voice used for every voice in the game, is cute and humorous only for the briefest of moments, before you realize that you are going to be hearing the exact same tones in different combinations for the next significant portion of your life. He commentates over every cutscene, speaking in quote format for other characters, and speaks quite a lot outside of cutscenes as well. I never want to hear this golden sod speak again.

The story seems to take some interesting twists in the time that I played, (up to chapter 8 out of 22) but it's such a slog to get through each chapter. Gameplay seems to be slotted in whenever the developer wanted, with dream sequences that don't advance the story taking up whole chapters appearing from nowhere and scarcely being mentioned again.
Overall, Horace's individual components are great, better than passing. But some very big issues crop up in the design of the game that really just make it not fun to play.

A great game overall, feels just like a 2D zelda with some minor changes. Ocean's heart rewards long side quests with suitably unique feeling items, which really makes you feel good about solving cross-map puzzles.

HOWEVER.

If you plan to play this game, please save very frequently! The game has no auto-save feature, which doesn't sit well with me. I played on a lower end pc, playing the entire latter half of this game in one sitting up to a point close to the end before experiencing a crash. I had not saved the entire session. I since have not returned to the game, nor intend to, but my experience was great up until that point. I recommend this if you want a familiar adventure experience with a couple small twists.

You can continuously pump water directly into someone's throat, causing them to asphyxiate to the point of unconsciousness, then throw their limp body into a (pit of spikes/incinerator/large body of water) to have them die a long and painful death. And the game doesn't tell you this in the tutorial, so it's a pretty good game.

In addition to all the basic stuff feeling good right off the bat (particularly the weight of the characters), Wildfire excels at player driven comedy. In my playthrough, I found myself playing around with the weaker enemies to try to manipulate their "unaware" states. For example if you pop up right behind someone, they will always jump backwards, startled. Yes, that means off cliffs and into wildfires. Top notch stuff, and the situations that you can create are just great.

Shorter than I thought it would be, but very deep. Every action has deep ripples through the story. The game is clever about its mechanics, and never once forced me to suspend of disbelief. I was thoroughly hooked by every part of the story, and it does a lot to place you in its universe. Some examples include letting you put your real email in at the start so you can receive emails updating you about in-world events, or giving you designated points to "log off" from the network if you'd like to stop playing for the real-world day. (Of course, you can still quit the game whenever and your progress is saved)
I really enjoyed the game.

I am... not good at this game. The connections and actions that you create in The Nation seem so paralyzing and permanent. I felt panic when everything flew out of my hands. The very hands that I had seen with my own eyes put entire nations into choke-holds. Orwell gives the player so much power and confidence in their Godlike ability to oversee all, but it cannot account for human error. You cannot perfectly predict the future or how someone may act, and so Orwell shows you through your own actions why this age of information that we have all come into is so scary. That the human elements of power and control are faulty, and that no one is worthy of control. Especially not you. A good game with a damn good message.

Really quite a fantastic game. It's got huge SCP vibes, with the same concept of hidden paranatural events being covered up constantly. This game manages to keep the characters human though. The game manages to keep you feeling uneasy the whole time with just how anomalous everything is. Within the first 10 min (before you get the first gun) there's a moment that completely disoriented me but it's hardly mentioned by the characters. I don't know what else to say here, but if you enjoy slowly feeling out a new expansive world, then this game's writing does it pretty damn well.

Oh, but the DLCs are not good.

Really great game. A good atmosphere paired with good shooting gameplay makes me happy anyday. STALKER has an intriguing story, varied gameplay, and a good range of difficulty. You start wearing nothing but a leather jacket and a pistol, and end wearing an exoskeleton with two rail guns strapped to your back, mowing down an entire military force. I might recommend some overhaul modding to fix up some side quest completion bugs, but otherwise the game is very playable from start to finish vanilla. I really recommend this, it's a classic that you'll really regret missing out on.