I bought this game for 4.99 and finished it in less than 5 hours, collecting all the materials.
Very nice graphics and enveloping game, for the price I paid it's a bargain.

It's impossible to listen to these stupid dialogues...

I don't remember how much this game cost, so it could be worth the money. Regardless, it's certainly not worth the time. It's not "bad", it's functional, and clearly all the foundations to game design are there. It's just disappointing, it's the foundations and nothing else. Nothing to make it special, or interesting.

While the game can look good, there are also moments where the performance tanks. I don't think that's just my pc, frames drop at any graphic setting. Not that they do much with this unique art style. Most of your time is spent looking at a screen full of black-red "gunk". While the animals and plants clearly have passion put into them, there isn't enough variety to make it stick. There are only a few different enemies, and even less scenes with animals not infected with "the gunk". The plants look cool as a picture, or scene, but throughout the whole game it's that same picture and scene, that same set of plants. It means you admire it the first two ish times, then never look at it again. For a game that has an analyze mechanic, there isn't much to analyze. This all applies to the cold, tron-like aesthetic of the 3rd act as well. Probably even worse actually, because now all your doing is turning lights from red to blue. The other alien architecture suffers from the same; not enough variety. Nothing in the game looks bad, I guess the people are a bit off putting but whatever. It’s just not great, it's disappointing.

Game play is split into two styles; combat, and puzzles. That being said, I use both those terms lightly, in fact “cleaning, and moving” works just as well. The combat/ cleaning sections see you primarily sucking up that titular gunk. There may be some enemies, but they just disrupt that sweet cleansing action. Beyond that the enemies mean nothing, they aren’t a challenge, nor interesting to fight. The puzzles aren’t better. Most of the time this segment is just running and jumping. Sometimes you have to interact with something, but it’s never hard to figure out what, nor technically challenging. This is also the time you may be “analyzing” things. You never learn anything useful from these, but they do unlock upgrades you’ll never use. Where the graphic could look pretty, the game play is mindless. I know this game’s labeled as “relaxing”, but that doesn’t mean easy. I want to have to think a little at least! I’ve enjoyed “walking simulators” more than this. Something needs to engage me!

The main characters annoy me. This may be a personal thing, but I couldn’t stand to hear them bicker. I also couldn’t tell you; their names, what the conflict was, how it was resolved, any backstory beyond that arm thing! I don’t know these people, and I have no reason to care for them. The dialog sounds like an AI wrote it. It’s hard to describe, it’s basic, and awkward. The dialog sounds like the rough draft where you get out the information, and that's it. It needs to be revised to add character, and make them sound human. Furthermore, what was the rest of the story? What's the theme? Climate change? The gunk was a natural evolution to the exploitation of that weird power source, it wasn’t made as a direct by product. Not that I caught on to anyways. That means the power source was there regardless, and the gunk was probably evolving to take advantage of it anyways. You find the gunk around natural reservoirs don’t you? it didn’t need to be dug up to be used. So then what? Is it something about the natives of the world being exploited? They went along with it, and as far as we know, only one of their whole population was against what happened. And exploited for what? What did the big bad gain? Wasn’t he stuck in that tower too? Please tell me if I’m missing something, I don’t get it.

I’m not a game designer, I’m just bored. I don’t know ♥♥♥♥ and it's great if you liked this game. I’d much rather the positivity, but this game just disappointed me. I know it's a small dev team, but people have done much more with less. Stray was made by a much smaller team, and it looked better, ran better, had better character. Undertale didn’t have realistic graphics, but its story and gameplay was amazing. 20 SMALL MAZES AT LEAST ENTERTAINED ME FOR ITS RUN TIME! This game had nothing engaging about it, nothing special, I won’t remember this game after I uninstall it. Hell I forgot about it multiple times while playing through it.