A great execution that's failed by a bad idea.
I may be biased against horror games in general since I think the concept is flawed, but this doesn't work as horror anyway.
The story is crap, there's no way to be nice about it, you get a dozen lines of dialogue awkwardly typed into the upper right-hand corner that do absolutely nothing of value for the gameplay loop.
It's a pity because that core loop really is excellent. The kind of game that almost deserves to be played in VR. The idea of scanning your environment like a low-fi flashlight is excellent, and the cave setting is a great fit for it.
There are some genuinely good puzzles here too, if it weren't for the cheap attempts to startle the player you'd have a great atmospheric puzzle-platformer with horror elements crafted solely through loneliness and the player's imagination.
Instead, the game is interrupted by a useless jumpscare that works once and then kills all the tension for the rest of the game. You died, respawned, and were fine. That's kinda why horror doesn't work in games, failure is the end of the tension, once it happens you're no longer tense about it.
If anything, I'd rather the glitches happen more organically, and be left in the water glitching out, thinking something's going to happen, only for it to never actually come. It almost feels like the dev didn't want to have to deal with figuring out the backtracking and so killed the player upon going somewhere they shouldn't have.
I'm only annoyed with this game because it had a lot of potential in it's core mechanic, and I feel that ALOT more could have been done here.
Still play it, it's worth seeing the idea.
I may be biased against horror games in general since I think the concept is flawed, but this doesn't work as horror anyway.
The story is crap, there's no way to be nice about it, you get a dozen lines of dialogue awkwardly typed into the upper right-hand corner that do absolutely nothing of value for the gameplay loop.
It's a pity because that core loop really is excellent. The kind of game that almost deserves to be played in VR. The idea of scanning your environment like a low-fi flashlight is excellent, and the cave setting is a great fit for it.
There are some genuinely good puzzles here too, if it weren't for the cheap attempts to startle the player you'd have a great atmospheric puzzle-platformer with horror elements crafted solely through loneliness and the player's imagination.
Instead, the game is interrupted by a useless jumpscare that works once and then kills all the tension for the rest of the game. You died, respawned, and were fine. That's kinda why horror doesn't work in games, failure is the end of the tension, once it happens you're no longer tense about it.
If anything, I'd rather the glitches happen more organically, and be left in the water glitching out, thinking something's going to happen, only for it to never actually come. It almost feels like the dev didn't want to have to deal with figuring out the backtracking and so killed the player upon going somewhere they shouldn't have.
I'm only annoyed with this game because it had a lot of potential in it's core mechanic, and I feel that ALOT more could have been done here.
Still play it, it's worth seeing the idea.