I feel like I played this game at an incredibly fortunate time in my life. Struggling to commit to any game for more than a few hours I was burned out on most modern game genres such as shooters, platformers and RPGs. When I first saw this recommended to me on steam during a sale I was intrigued by the art-style and main gameplay mechanic. I didn't have particularly high hopes I just knew it was highly rated and had a unique aesthetic. If you had told me I was going to play through the game in one long 8 hour session whilst losing track of the time I'd have been shocked. This game is good. REALLY good.
Mechanically the game is fairly simple. You walk up to a corpse, use your stopwatch on it and you get several pieces of information. It starts with fully voiced dialogue of the moments leading up to the death. Then once that finishes you get the big picture, the actual moment of death in frozen tableau. One of the most impressive things about this game for me is the way it sets your expectations for what the game will throw at you and then continually makes you re-assess what in the actual fuck is happening.
Once having viewed the scene you are asked to fill in notebook and describe who died and what killed them, and later what happened to the passengers who went missing off screen. Did they die? Did they escape? You don't have the answer spelled out for you and have to make a lot of educated inferences to finish the game. While some games are easy and use puzzles to make you "feel" smart, this game feels both challenging and rewarding. I never got stuck and had to use a guide. Meticulous checking off of names and revisiting scenes with newfound context is the name of the game here. Really great stuff.
This game and Outer Wilds are two games that completely changed how I viewed what games could be. I can easily say I have never played anything quite like it. A must play.
Mechanically the game is fairly simple. You walk up to a corpse, use your stopwatch on it and you get several pieces of information. It starts with fully voiced dialogue of the moments leading up to the death. Then once that finishes you get the big picture, the actual moment of death in frozen tableau. One of the most impressive things about this game for me is the way it sets your expectations for what the game will throw at you and then continually makes you re-assess what in the actual fuck is happening.
Once having viewed the scene you are asked to fill in notebook and describe who died and what killed them, and later what happened to the passengers who went missing off screen. Did they die? Did they escape? You don't have the answer spelled out for you and have to make a lot of educated inferences to finish the game. While some games are easy and use puzzles to make you "feel" smart, this game feels both challenging and rewarding. I never got stuck and had to use a guide. Meticulous checking off of names and revisiting scenes with newfound context is the name of the game here. Really great stuff.
This game and Outer Wilds are two games that completely changed how I viewed what games could be. I can easily say I have never played anything quite like it. A must play.