TheFourthStooge
Observation 2019
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This review contains spoilers
It's very rare I despise a game, let alone a game that most people seem to enjoy. But I absolutely hated this game.
First off this game has some incredible looking envrionments, UI and great sound design, I don't think it's enough to carry how bad the rest of the game is, and I don't think it really does anything interesting with these elements, but it would be dishonest to not mention it.
I noticed very early on that there is no fail state in this game. If you don't do something, or do something wrong, there are absolutely no consequences. This remained true throughout the entire playthrough, and I'm not saying that not having some way of failing a task or making the player repeat sections is bad by default. But it does mean that it's kind of impossible for the game to create any sort of tension or fear in the player through gameplay. And the game needs to rely on something else to engage the player.
I also noticed very early on that while you play as an artificial intelligence, there is a human NPC that acompanies you. For about 80% of this games length, you might as well be playing as this character, you don't make any decisions or have any influence on the story or environment, either in gameplay or cutscenes, and you experience new things at exactly the same time as this human NPC. So why are we playing as an AI in the first place? I'll get into this later but I don't think the game does anything interesting with this premise.
And two more things I noticed very early on, the game is extremely linear, with things only progressing in an extremely specific order. And also, as soon as anything important happens, all your controls are stripped away from you and you are forced to participate in the mediocre story excatly as the game intended. For example, a fire occurs in a part of the space station early on, and as soon as this happens you suddenly don't have access to any of the games mechanics that have been introduced up to this point untill you put out the fire. But because there is no fail state the fire will just keep burning forever until you put it out. Situations like this happen constantly throughout the entire game.
I want to say that I have no problem with slower paced, more experimental gameplay systems, or extremely linear games, or games with lots of cutscenes, or horror games that don't exclusivley rely on tension and jumpsares. But there needs to be something to engage with on a gameplay or story level (but preferrably both). Sadly this game has nothing.
The closest thing to gameplay in this game is looking at stuff through a camera, which honestly could have been enough if the game was structured differently or had a better story. The other gameplay element is solving 'puzzles' that are more basic and less mentally engaging than the tasks you do in among us, which again, are impossible to fail in this game so they just end up being busy work.
The story is trash, both in the way that you experience it and as a story by itself. The game clearly takes inspiration from cosmic horror sci-fi films like Annihilation and 2001 A Space Odyessy, both in it's story and visuals. This is especially true in it's vague, trippy ending, which unlike those previously mentioned films, it does not earn or build up to at all.
The story is a complete disaster in basically every way, it is structured in a way to allow for some build up, establishing the characters aboard the space station through audio and text logs, getting some information about the mission and the world the game takes place in without some crazy disaster to prevent. But almost nothing is actually revealed about any of this until the end when the plot is just explained to you by a computer. This game basically spends 3 hours making you do meanial tasks where you can't even explore the station on your own, with the only story element expanded on being that the captain has been acting kind of strange lately (holy shit no way), and that the crew thinks they are doing research to prevent climate change (which has absolutely nothing to do with the themes of the story and is never mentioned in any dialogue whatsoever).
The game does absolutely nothing with the whole, playing as an AI thing. You blindly follow instructions from beginning to end with no agency at any point, weather it's a person or some alien entity near the end, you just follow orders. I think it was a mistake for the big disaster to occur as soon as the game starts, I would have loved to play as an AI when everything is going well, being this cold outsider among humans, watching them from afar, only participating when needed for something practical.
This game is like the experience of watching Annihilation, Arrival or 2001, except someone has edited out all the interesting dialogue and storytelling through visuals and dubbed over it with the most generic uninteresting narration you've ever heard. And every five minutes the film pauses so that you can fill in a wordsearch from the back of the kids menu at a local space themed restaurant.
I could keep ranting about how much I disliked this game that no one gives a shit about for hours honestly. I REALLY did not like this game. I have so many more points I could cover: The alien entity being represented as creepypasta tier black goo all over the spaceship, I could go more into how bad the dialogue is, how often the game makes you play as drone moving around 3D space, which must have made the game so much more expensive and time consuming to make, and yet provides nothing new in terms of gameplay or story and only serves to distract from the unique presentation of watching all the games events unfold through security cameras. Also the captain in the game has been lying to the whole crew about the real purpose of their mission, and yet even though the main character and the AI you play as discovers this they never even mention it to him? There are plenty of times in this game where two characters talk to each other, but all the dialogue is solely focused on boring functional shit like. "We need to release the couplings to ventilate the cooling system." I don't fucking care about this boring practical information! I want a story! Some character traits! Some emotion! What is the fucking point of this game!!!
First off this game has some incredible looking envrionments, UI and great sound design, I don't think it's enough to carry how bad the rest of the game is, and I don't think it really does anything interesting with these elements, but it would be dishonest to not mention it.
I noticed very early on that there is no fail state in this game. If you don't do something, or do something wrong, there are absolutely no consequences. This remained true throughout the entire playthrough, and I'm not saying that not having some way of failing a task or making the player repeat sections is bad by default. But it does mean that it's kind of impossible for the game to create any sort of tension or fear in the player through gameplay. And the game needs to rely on something else to engage the player.
I also noticed very early on that while you play as an artificial intelligence, there is a human NPC that acompanies you. For about 80% of this games length, you might as well be playing as this character, you don't make any decisions or have any influence on the story or environment, either in gameplay or cutscenes, and you experience new things at exactly the same time as this human NPC. So why are we playing as an AI in the first place? I'll get into this later but I don't think the game does anything interesting with this premise.
And two more things I noticed very early on, the game is extremely linear, with things only progressing in an extremely specific order. And also, as soon as anything important happens, all your controls are stripped away from you and you are forced to participate in the mediocre story excatly as the game intended. For example, a fire occurs in a part of the space station early on, and as soon as this happens you suddenly don't have access to any of the games mechanics that have been introduced up to this point untill you put out the fire. But because there is no fail state the fire will just keep burning forever until you put it out. Situations like this happen constantly throughout the entire game.
I want to say that I have no problem with slower paced, more experimental gameplay systems, or extremely linear games, or games with lots of cutscenes, or horror games that don't exclusivley rely on tension and jumpsares. But there needs to be something to engage with on a gameplay or story level (but preferrably both). Sadly this game has nothing.
The closest thing to gameplay in this game is looking at stuff through a camera, which honestly could have been enough if the game was structured differently or had a better story. The other gameplay element is solving 'puzzles' that are more basic and less mentally engaging than the tasks you do in among us, which again, are impossible to fail in this game so they just end up being busy work.
The story is trash, both in the way that you experience it and as a story by itself. The game clearly takes inspiration from cosmic horror sci-fi films like Annihilation and 2001 A Space Odyessy, both in it's story and visuals. This is especially true in it's vague, trippy ending, which unlike those previously mentioned films, it does not earn or build up to at all.
The story is a complete disaster in basically every way, it is structured in a way to allow for some build up, establishing the characters aboard the space station through audio and text logs, getting some information about the mission and the world the game takes place in without some crazy disaster to prevent. But almost nothing is actually revealed about any of this until the end when the plot is just explained to you by a computer. This game basically spends 3 hours making you do meanial tasks where you can't even explore the station on your own, with the only story element expanded on being that the captain has been acting kind of strange lately (holy shit no way), and that the crew thinks they are doing research to prevent climate change (which has absolutely nothing to do with the themes of the story and is never mentioned in any dialogue whatsoever).
The game does absolutely nothing with the whole, playing as an AI thing. You blindly follow instructions from beginning to end with no agency at any point, weather it's a person or some alien entity near the end, you just follow orders. I think it was a mistake for the big disaster to occur as soon as the game starts, I would have loved to play as an AI when everything is going well, being this cold outsider among humans, watching them from afar, only participating when needed for something practical.
This game is like the experience of watching Annihilation, Arrival or 2001, except someone has edited out all the interesting dialogue and storytelling through visuals and dubbed over it with the most generic uninteresting narration you've ever heard. And every five minutes the film pauses so that you can fill in a wordsearch from the back of the kids menu at a local space themed restaurant.
I could keep ranting about how much I disliked this game that no one gives a shit about for hours honestly. I REALLY did not like this game. I have so many more points I could cover: The alien entity being represented as creepypasta tier black goo all over the spaceship, I could go more into how bad the dialogue is, how often the game makes you play as drone moving around 3D space, which must have made the game so much more expensive and time consuming to make, and yet provides nothing new in terms of gameplay or story and only serves to distract from the unique presentation of watching all the games events unfold through security cameras. Also the captain in the game has been lying to the whole crew about the real purpose of their mission, and yet even though the main character and the AI you play as discovers this they never even mention it to him? There are plenty of times in this game where two characters talk to each other, but all the dialogue is solely focused on boring functional shit like. "We need to release the couplings to ventilate the cooling system." I don't fucking care about this boring practical information! I want a story! Some character traits! Some emotion! What is the fucking point of this game!!!