Recent reviews by anarchy

In its current state, I don't love it.

Plenty of puzzles are good, the logic grids and pattern completion is all great. But there are a LOT that feel like filler. "Look at this from the right angle and press M1" is repeated over at least 4 'different' puzzle types and I'm still early in the game.

There's also a tonne of "puzzles" which are just invisible objects you can't see until you're close to them. Not a puzzle, not fun. Even worse when the only hint to finding many is a high pitched ringing noise many players can't seem to hear, myself included as it seems to be masked by my tinnitus. There are no accessibility options for such things. A high pitched ringing as your only hint is terrible game design.

Areas are broken up so you can see how many puzzles are in an area, but once you've solved most of them, finding the last few is an absolute nightmare. Finding an invisible little box SOMEWHERE on a large island isn't a puzzle. It isn't fun, it isn't rewarding. FINDING the puzzle should not BE the puzzle in a puzzle game.

The online stuff is, at best, intrusive for what is a single-player game. I don't want a constant popup on my screen telling me Xz-L33tSn1p3r-zX solved a puzzle in their game every 12 seconds. You have no option to opt out of the always-online ♥♥♥♥, and no option to hide the visual spam that comes with it. Worse, you can be chugging along in your single-player game, and be unable to progress, because random lag spikes keep sending you back to the bottom of the launch-pad thing, or jump you around inside a transparent maze so you have no idea where you are any more.

For the moment, I would hold off on buying this until player numbers dwindle and they can't afford to keep it as an always-online experience.

Edit:

All of the things I mentioned are still annoying.

There are some late-game puzzle types that are just unenjoyable to play. Music grids are nice when they're smaller, but they reach a point where it's just a cacophony of noise with like 12 instruments being played at random points over 1 second where it asks you to pick out which is being played in which order.

There's also some time-based challenges which ask you to solve 20 hard candy-crush-style match three games in 60 seconds. If you actually want to pass it, it has nothing to do with solving the puzzles. It's sitting down for literally several hours, memorising the exact sequence of moves which adds up to about 100 movements, and then just playing the same 20 puzzles ad nauseum until you can successfully make all the moves flawlessly and fast enough.

Many players also dislike the Morphic Fractal puzzles, where you essentially drag your mouse around until a picture matches the example. They are so wildly unpredictable that there isn't a lot of strategy beyond just moving your mouse randomly until things look right.

Overall, it is a good game, but it just has these constant thorns in your side to remind you that there are problems with it.

Edit 2:

At this point I've completed all the enclaves. They are the small islands with a set number of fixed puzzles. That means what's left is the 'open world.' It is filled with hundreds of puzzles that rotate every few hours, so the puzzle you found in a place one day might be absent the next. To progress through rewards, you need to do a set number of a type of puzzle in a region. ie. You might need to do 200 logic grids to get an ugly hat.

I'm not set on doing everything. In each region there are THOUSANDS of puzzles in each category. However, the big disappointment for me comes from the fact that you can get duplicates. I KNOW I solved a siteseer puzzle in the exact same place with the exact same view. I remember that yesterday I found a hidden ring in the same place because I noted that its placement was unusual. I followed a wandering echo that jumped between those same 4 pillars.

Sure, I can play more and avoid the dupes, but it's not really fun to just tick up an exorbitantly large number for the sake of it when they don't even put in the effort to make them unique. The store page brags about 10,000 puzzles or whatever but when today alone I've played 3 different logic grids, all with a solution that I recognise I've done before, and I can check my stats to see all three counted as a new puzzle, well what's the point?

I love the Arkham games, and this game is here solely to spit on their graves.

The game is decidedly not built to play alone. Even in single player you have “lives” and need to wait for the bots to revive you. Multiple times I’ve had them just ♥♥♥♥ about jumping over me and missing the ledge where I’m downed so I’m just waiting for a long time to be able to play. I don’t want an end-of-mission screen that tells me who did the best in the squad. It’s me. I’m playing solo. I KNOW I DID BETTER THAN THE ZERO OTHER PLAYERS. There’s also a LOT of sniper enemies in the game, and in solo, it amounts to most combat encounters having 5-6 sniper lasers pointed at you, and only you, the entire time. They also stand far enough back on ledges that if you aren’t above them, you can’t hit them, and then when you get to where you can hit them, they teleport to a different ledge.

Don’t forget, every character also has a unique way of getting around the city. Also don’t forget, every one of them is made INCREDIBLY limited and input-intensive so that you can’t move too much faster when other players are around. As everyone is playing solo, however, this just serves to make the movement around the city INCREDIBLY cumbersome. Even moreso when you realise there’s only one fast travel point on the entire map, and it’s in one of the far corners, not even the middle.

The 4 characters lack identity. Why do I want to play any one over the others? They all play exactly the same way. They share the same guns between them, only each character is limited to 3 gun types out of 5, they share grenades, their special moves are just 1 aoe damage and 1 single target damage move. There’s nothing that sets them apart. In terms of personality, they are all VERY one-note. If I have to hear about Deadnot having a daughter one more time, I’m gonna hunt her down and feed her to Braniac myself. Every character has a perks system, every perk is just “at combo, do more damage.” No perk has felt meaningful, or worth changing your playstyle to use more efficiently. It's worht mentioning that there are unlockable cosmetics for playing, however I now have all of them, and only one outfit for one character doesn’t look like absolute ♥♥♥♥, because obviously they want you to go to their store to buy the half-decent ones.

The actual gameplay is ok for a while, but it gets stale fast. It’s one of those games where there’s about 4 enemy types, and then later they’ll pretend there’s new ones by reskinning the starter enemies and maybe giving them a little gimmick. There are short, infinite missions for crappy rewards, but they highlight how shallow the gameplay is because every single one is just “kill 10 of one enemy type,” “kill with gun type,” “use status effects.” Later in the game you receive a SECOND constant batch of the exact same missions. Why? Dunno, they feel just as worthless.

The actual missions also feel samey; just kill ♥♥♥♥, sometimes with a gimmick about “only this attack does damage,” sometimes with a basically meaningless collection aspect. No mission so far has felt significantly different from any other. The actual bossfights against the League are super underwhelming, almost all of them just being “keep shooting while they repeat the same 3 attacks” followed by the League member just doing the most default falling-over animation ever when their hp bar finally runs out, and that’s the kill.

Early game, most of the combat is spent re-climbing scyscrapers, because that’s where all the enemies are, and if a helicopter gets involved, they WILL freeze you, which throws you all the way down to ground level before you’re allowed to break out of the ice. Tanks are allowed to perfectly track and shoot at you through multiple buildings.

The loot system sucks. I’ve basically just glazed over and only read the DPS and unique passive because there’s so many meaningless stats. Also, it’s 2024, where the hell is the button to scrap everything in my inventory below a certain quality? I’m getting popups of “stuff was sent to the mailbox because your inventory is full” because I have to go through and manually mark 300 crap-tier pieces of junk for scrapping. And it’s not just “go to your inventory and scrap.” You have to go to each individual character and go into each slot to delete the items in that category. You can’t scrap Harley’s melee weapons while looking at Boomerang, etc. It’s a slog.

Speaking of slogs, there’s a daily reward which can reach high tier equipment, and to get it, all you have to do is spend over 2 hours every day hunting about 100 of one type of flying drone that spawns scattered over the map, hundreds of meters in the air. They are not interesting or rewarding to kill on their own, their only combat is to start a teleport to flee. Have fun! Also good luck grinding them if you’re trying to level King Shark, because all the weapon types he can use are TERRIBLE at killing them.

There are status effects which are genuinely terrible. I’ve played for 30 hours, and EVERY weapon I get with good DPS has this stupid “Black Mask” effect which sets fire to nearly every enemy. This stupid burning effect disables your ability to gain shields from enemies, which means you very quickly run out (they don’t regen in combat without pickups) and more importantly makes certain missions downright impossible when the enemies ONLY take damage from the shield-harvest move. At this point I’ve been relegated to using lower damage weapons just to not have the basic survivability tool fully disabled.

Additionally, there are some modes where only crits deal damage, which is fine, but all other damage causes enemies to heal instead. Several of these missions involve tanks, which only take crits on their weak points. In solo, this means you can destroy all of their weak points (bar the one on their back because you can’t hit it when they target you instead of the bot teammates 100% of the time) but the bots will just fire indiscriminantly, keeping their hp at 100%. You literally cannot kill the tanks around your teammates healing them.

Riddler exists again. Except this time, because your characters lack gadgets or interesting gameplay mechanics, his trophies just sit on the ground for you to pick up. His “races” are all less than 30 seconds long, and the only ones I had to repeat were due to the next ring being hard to spot, not hard to reach. After doing all of his stuff… nothing. No “I’ll beat you next time!” no confrontation, he just stops calling to nag you to do his stuff.

And look, all of that is without even touching on the fact that to go between the main base and the open world, you need to walk through a hallway of propaganda every time, or that they race-swapped a character who is established in the universe. Oh yeah, that other Floyd Lawton, the one who shot people from across an entire city, bouncing bullets off helicopters, and who went toe-to-toe with batman twice? Yeah uh… he was… an imposter! Yeah, that’s it.

Also I forgot, how many decades are we into gaming? What the ♥♥♥♥ is the excuse for forcing players to stand around, locked into walking speed, unable to leave a rooftop, EVERY TIME people want to rant long boring instructions at me. TALK WHILE I MOVE, I DON'T WANT TO STAND STILL AND LISTEN TO EVERY LINE OF "GO HERE, SHOOT THIS" DIALOGUE.

One more edit, and I'm not one for spoilers but this is something that prospective buyers NEED to know before they commit:

The end of the current game's story is "congratulations, story complete, continue the main objective in season 1." You cannot buy this game as is, and finish the main storyline. A tremendous amount is set to be locked behind "seasons" which, looking at the sales and player stats, will not happen. If you're on the fence but still want to play the story, wait and see what happens and whether they end up finishing the story when they shut down the live service.

It's a pretty good game. Leon goes to a village, then Leon goes to a castle, then Leon goes to an island.

Apparently there's a zombie or something. I dunno, I didn't really pay attention to that part.

At this point, I've finished a 100% run, and rerun the first 2-3 hours for each house in order to get the unique house quest/achievement for each.

Pros:

I love the style of the exploration. Both in and out of the castle felt significant and they managed to have two very different scales still feel relatively similar in value. The open world map is well done, and unlike other recent titles all of the locations feel hand-made, as opposed to something like Assassin's Creed Odyssey or Elden Ring which fill a much larger map by copy-pasting the same camps/dungeons/assets ad nauseum.
While it is clear that most dialogue options don’t have an overarching effect, the actual dialogue choices are strong. Most games will give you the most bland a-or-b decisions, but there were a number of key moments where you were given a really good compromise between what seems like the obvious choices.
The main story felt great within the universe while still being a completely unique concept. The story itself wasn’t the most engaging but it gave a cohesive reason for progressing. The side quests were incredible, and to be honest, the Sebastian Sallow questline completely overshadowed the main story. It had brilliant characters, it was emotional in a realistic way and it genuinely makes you consider your choices.
I didn’t like the gear system, but you unlock transmogs for everything you find, as well as “collection” ones that are a transmog without an item. Being able to keep appearances I like without it affecting stats is great.
Combat was generally fun, following the Arkham-style of basic attacks, specials, and emphasis on countering but in a much more ranged form. Some of the spells felt like they lacked a reason to exist (Incendio vs Confringo, Levioso vs Wingardium Leviosa) but at the same time it gives you options in how you play without forcing you to use identical spells to everyone else.

Cons:
The entire gear system is a mess. From the start of the game you have a wildly limited capacity to hold things, and no immediate way to sell them. (You begin with 20 slots, 6 of which are taken by what you have equipped) If you choose to explore the castle early on you will be punished by this. It expands later but it feels like there’s only a cap for the sake of being irritating so that a side activity can reward you with less annoyance.
Upgrading gear gives it such a tiny boost, by the end of the game, stats-wise, you have 8 things equipped instead of 6 if all 6 are upgraded to max. There’s a LOT of extra trait upgrades, 2/3 of which are completely useless because I’m never going to spend resources on a level 1 or 2 trait when it is exactly as easy to install the level 3 of the same trait. Most of the traits are also terrible, why would I invest in giving 1 specific spell a small damage boost when for the same cost I can buff every damaging spell I have? It’s also worth noting that upgrades require the Room of Requirement beast care, and for the max upgrade you basically don’t have access to the beast required until 1 or 2 main quests before the end of the entire game.
There’s a lot of small points where options just haven’t been considered to be less annoying. Once you can add traits to gear, any non-legendary gear is pointless as they don’t allow level 3 traits, so a “sell all X quality” items button at stores would be nice rather than needing to sell everything one by one. Transmogs also have to be applied to every piece you equip, and as you get a piece with better stats about every 5 mins, that’s often. It would be great to be able to apply a transmog to a slot in general and not have to redo it every time. Alohomora can be levelled up to get through higher tier locks which are basically just progression blockers until mid-game. The mini-game for locks is dull as hell, never gets harder, never changes, never becomes interesting, but you’re forced to do it hundreds of times just because. An option like “I’ve done the same minigame 10 times, skip this from now on” would be great.

Lastly, I don’t really know if I’d put this as a pro or a con, because it fits into both depending on the player. I personally felt there were just a few too many ‘nods’ to the Harry Potter series. Like yes, it’s the same universe, the same school, but at a point it’s like herbology is repotting Mandrakes, Care of Magical Creatures leads to Hippogriffs, Nearly Headless Nick is trying to join the Headless Hunt and has BASICALLY his entire dialogue from the second book, every character has a surname relating them directly to a Harry Potter character. Like who the hell is Professor Weasley? Why is she so type-casted as Molly Weasley when she HAS to be related to Arthur instead? At some point it feels like the writers really need to step out of the shadow and do more with the elements we haven’t seen. Focus on creatures that weren’t the main creature in the movies, just do something a bit different. In that respect it again pulls me toward the Sebastian Sallow story because he’s a completely unique character going through a situation that’s entirely unseen in the series.

Overall, great game. A little short story-wise, but plenty of side content that still felt meaningful within the world.

An interesting game that sits weirdly in its own niche.

The main gameplay loop revolves around finding a clue to start a case, which could be finding a body, someone asking for help or just listening in on the right conversation as you move around the open world. From there you follow the different clues to various locations, look up city records, interrogate suspects and scour crime scenes for evidence to piece together what happened. Overall it's fun but it has its drawbacks.

It's very long for a game where each quest plays out in essentially the same way, by the end I was getting bored and just wanted to get through cases moreso than actually caring what happened in them. Some hints to progress are very vague or downright misleading, nearly every time I had to search archives for information it was a headache working out where to look and what search categories to use. There's a weird combat system shoehorned in that could be cut entirely without harming the game at all, and honestly should have been.

The biggest issue however is the main story. In working to remember/solve Sherlock's mother's death, you follow several main cases which involve connecting pieces of evidence to form a conclusion about who the killer in each case is and why they did it. Unfortunately, these cases all offer you multiple way to interpret different clues and pick a different murderer with different motives. That sounds cool and all, but the outcome is never wrong, so it makes the work of solving the case feel meaningless when you can't get the wrong answer even if you just pick at random.

Overall, an enjoyable game, but it dragged towards the end and had some minor irritations throughout.

The biggest thing I keep hearing is "it's not an Arkham game, stop comparing it to Arkham games!" Well if you don't want your game to be compared to Arkham, then put in the effort to make a different game instead of starting with Arkham and making tweaks until it seems 'different enough.'

The main story is decent, though quite a few key moments were way too predictable. Masked characters whose identities were painfully clear from the word go, lategame 'twists' that were signposted from the start of the game. The main story is also relatively short, with only 8 acts consisting of 3 or less missions apiece.

Most of the gameplay is spent in a repeating loop of 'patrols.' You pick a character, enter the city, and stop preset crimes on the map. Small crimes reveal big crimes on the NEXT patrol, but those big crimes will be there regardless, albeit harder to track down. It gets repetitive very quickly, and while the different crimes are frames as having different objectives, they almost all boil down to 'takedown/beatdown everyone at this location.'

It's fairly annoying to have to go in and out of the Belfry hub to reset the map with new crimes, but also your ability to swap characters is limited to between patrols, any gear you craft from blueprints during a patrol is inaccessible until you return to the Belfry, and each patrol will only load 1 part of each side activity such as parkour time trials, batcycle races and stealth information gathering. It's the sort of thing that many players would like to do one after the other and there's no reason to not allow that except to slow progress down.

So back to not really being 'not an Arkham game.' All the pieces of Arkham are there, but it feels like the devs tried to change them just enough to feel different, and it ended up being significantly for the worse. "Detective Vision" has been replaced with "AR." AR is basically functionally identical to detective vision, except it works as a ping that lasts a second or two before you need to reping to keep seeing the same information. It's just annoying to have to spam the button for it basically all game when they know their ENTIRE audience is used to a toggle. Not better, just different. Collectables are a nightmare. There are Batarangs which are decent, as they're mostly high on rooftops and visible from a long distance with a blue glow. Street art is fine as there's not many and they light up as huge yellow squares in AR. Historical locations are tiny, tiny plaques on random buildings, found only by running aimlessly around street level mashing the AR button looking for the one pixel of dull yellow indicating the plaque. Historical Strigidae are tiny faded chalk drawings with tiny indicative signposts pointing to them scattered all over the city with no rhyme nor reason, and the signs are basically only visible at the right angles with line of sight. Truly awfully designed collectables, and with very little reward to finding them. At least Arkham had a way to reveal remaining riddles when you were struggling to track one down.

Combat is, I would say, messy. It's like they tried to cram too much into it and instead of making something complex and interesting it just ended up a confusing mess. "Countering" has been replaced by evading, and you can perform a counterattack if you evade with precise timing. Most of the enemies have some form of blocking or evading until you perform the right move against them, usually heavy melee for blocks, heavy ranged for evasion, with some arbitrary exceptions. This is fine early on when you might have one evasive enemy in a crowd of trash, but late game nearly every enemy is blocking or evading. When you start to perform your heavy range to hit the evasive enemy, others can easily interrupt the animation, the evasive enemy can dodge anyway, or the auto targeting will decide to aim at basically anything except what you want to hit. Then when you do land the block break, you have to dodge a punch or something and the enemy is back to evading before you can even land a damaging strike. It's just too overwhelmingly controlling as to how you will attack every specific enemy to the point that you spend more of the fight breaking invulnerability phases than you do actually getting to hit someone. Speaking of ranged attacks, on K+M at least I found Red Hood borderline unplayable as he's based mainly around his quick ranged combos, which prefer to spin around and aim at the camera than shoot the enemy 1m directly in front of him.

There are elemental effects all of which boil down to either "stun" or "DoT" or a combination of both, and only really serve to make your damage pitiful if you're using the wrong element weapons against the wrong faction, and to make 99% of blueprint drops worthless as they have no elemental damage.

In terms of performance the game looks beautiful, but on average crashed once every hour, always on loading screens or during fast travel. Stuff like that shouldn't make it past QA. The DLC/Deluxe edition contains essentially nothing.

I've waited for this game for 7 years, I would've been happy with something that was good but not groundbreaking, instead I just found myself beating my head against a wall wondering what the hell caused them to make bad decision after bad decision after bad decision.

The story is great and genuinely enjoyable. Compared with the Dark Pictures games, the Quarry is well and truly the spiritual successor to Until Dawn. A bunch of teens in a secluded horror setting, a pack of monsters hunting them, and some mysterious hunters that they don't know if they can trust or not. Felt far better as a standalone story than any of the anthology games have recently.

The biggest issue by far is that they've ignored the progress they made in the Dark Pictures and cut 2 person co-op entirely. The only option for co-op is for your friends to pay $90 per person in order to watch you play single player and vote on decisions. For how much interaction they would get, you'd be better off streaming in discord and just having them vote anyway. Saves $90 and they get exactly the same experience.

Performance-wise, the game struggles hard. I've experienced numerous crashes, many just when trying to open a menu, or at the end of a chapter the game simply hangs then gives up. There's a disgusting amount of motion blur which is impossible to disable with either in-game options or outside sources. At this point in game design, motion blur should never be on by default, let alone preventing the player from turning it off at all.

Outside of performance issues, there's lots of visual glitches and issues in the game. Objects randomly brightly lit in an otherwise dark room, pulling out a drawer causes all the contents of the drawer to stay where they were while the drawer phases through them, certain object popping in and out of existence especially in the background.

Achievement hunting feels as bad (or worse) as it has in the past with these games, with many that, for basically no reason, can't be obtained in runs where you get others. It feels like you have to do about 7 or 8 playthroughs of the game to be able to collect them all, more if you wanted to play your first run blind and so didn't optimally make every choice. Normally this is passable in these games, but collectables aren't saved between runs, and it's impossible to collect all evidence, clues and tarot cards in one playthrough, meaning you're never going to have one nice save file with all the collection intact.

It's also a bit annoying that the early game sets most of the characters on romantic arcs, linking them up with a partner, but then from about the midpoint onwards, all of that means basically nothing. All the 'couples' split off and do their own things and nobody really has much character development after that. Also, the main character Ryan has about as much personality as a brick.

All in all, decent game with some glaring issues, performance and crash problems and worst of all is the slap in the face that they want to charge double the price for this when it; a. doesn't really build anything on previous titles. It's a good game, but there's nothing new about it that even starts to justify it costing more than any of the others, and b. cuts out existing features like co-op. I generally avoid buying DPA games until they're on sale anyway, so having this start at double their base price is ludicrous at best.

It's just not good enough for what it is.

Currently there's only about 12 rooms to escape, which for me has taken under 4 hours. The developer has launched the game as a basically unheard of studio with no other games on Steam, at $30 AUD, and already has 2 DLC packs planned at the cost of DOUBLING the price of the base game. This is NOT a $60 game, and this just reeks of cut content to milk the game for more money, rather than adding to something down the line.

The rooms give you an excessively long time to solve them. 95% of the 'puzzles' are utterly brainless, to the degree that I barely had to think to already have the answer in. Most codes to locks etc feel like they're directly above the lock. There's only one or two points in any of the rooms that gave me any sort of pause to think about them. Despite the difficulty rating going up as you progress, the rooms feel no harder, and I'm annoyed I didn't refund before the 2 hour cutoff, as I expected 'harder' puzzles that never came. Without any aid I scored the highest A+ grade on every room without effort.

There's very little agency in solving things, and no way to overthink anything. For instance, there's a puzzle involving finding pieces to recreate some art, but when you go to place any of the pieces you find, they all just drop on the table in the right place at the right angle. Rather than at least having the interesting interaction of trying to line things up and find the right perspective to view them, everything is just plonked in place for you, brain off. Any object in the room will either be key to a puzzle, or interacting with it will basically have the dialogue popup say "nothing useful here!" which removes the fun or working out what's relevant and what's extraneous detail The game is set up in a manner which largely forces you to solve A to access B, solve B to access C, solve C to access D. There's only one or two rooms which feel like they have any form of open-endedness to the order you go about solving them.

In terms of visuals, the art style is lacking. It's heavily Danganronpa-inspired, which means large, chunky cartoon aesthetics in the environment, with 2D VN style drawings for dialogue. Not a fan of the character designs at all. The headmaster looks so haggard that all she reminds me of is Yzma, and one of the janitor's eyes is halfway down his head. Characters are very one dimensional, especially your 'rival' who is the most generic 'I hate you because I'm your rival, and I think I'm better than you' character ever written.

Many players are experiencing graphical glitches, I personally had a section of a room where textures were strobing through a solid wall from outside. Most of the achievements are being reported as bugged for various users.

The game has co-op, but as there are only 12 rooms and all are exceedingly easy, I have no desire to play the game through again with someone else, and I'm glad I didn't as it would have just slowed both of us down by needing to fiddle to manage an inventory that isn't shared between you.

All in all, I would not recommend buying this game, and I certainly would not have bought it full price if I'd realised ahead of time that I'd be supporting the scummy practice of releasing a buggy game with half the content cut at the price of a full game.

Not worth the money at all.

I stopped around 2 hours into a game that is supposedly around 8 hours. Literally nothing had happened up to that point. The game is an absolute walking simulator. You move at a crawl, and by holding the run button which is disabled for many areas, you move at a walking-pace jog. There are lots of very large open areas with 1-2 objects you can interact with, most of which are just unconnected flavour like a random magazine cover or a poster.

There is very, very little story unless you consider the main character whining about how hard it is to be a medium.

Gameplay is marketed as revolutionary and unique, but most of it is just walking around looking for the single highlighted object in the room to pick up and progress. The "two worlds" split screen is underwhelming at best. Rather than feeling like moving between worlds to subvert obstacles in the other, you are just unable to progress in either if there's something blocking you in one. There are a couple of moments where you can use an out of body experience to progress past obstacles in the real world, but these are few and far between.

It looks decent, but has some serious issues with stuttering, frame drops, and screen tearing on anything above 'medium' settings, and this is on a PC that runs most games on ultra without issue.

Really, it's just nothing groundbreaking, and the devs clearly went for a lot of style over substance and it lacks any interesting gameplay or story. Save your money for a ~75% off sale unless you really like walking simulators.

This game was a massive load. I've had it on my wishlist for ages and it was a MASSIVE letdown.

First and foremost, the mechanics suck.

It is a game where the core gameplay revolves around staying in the light. While this sounds cool initially, really it just means flicking on lightswitches to make entire rooms "safe" with no pressure of them becoming unsafe again.

It is VERY hard to tell what is considered light and what is considered dark. There are areas of black shadow you can stroll through safely, and there are areas of slight dimness where you instantly die. An exception annoyance is that many rooms are "dark" and unsafe, but you are allowed (and intended) to walk a few steps in, look to the side and flick on the lightswitch. Other rooms will kill you instantly for attempting that. Deaths set you back to the start of the area so any death like this means running back around to collect all the usable items.

The entire game is completely linear; walk to A, pick up B, walk to C, use B on D, repeat. There's no room for creativity or problem solving. Many "puzzles" were very simply laid out, others seemed to just be guesswork, an element that came up in many monster scenes which hinged on "choose which of these 20 doors is unlocked" far more times than was welcome.

Pet peeve, I LOATHE games like this where you collect things or search for clues when they put in 500,000 drawers and lockers to open and search when only about 1-2 have things in them across the whole game. Obviously they cut down work by reusing assets, because I've never seen so many excuses to have locker rooms in a game just so they could fill the space with a copy pasted empty locker.

The story was ABYSMAL. Going by "the good ending" that I got, the opening scene was completely unrelated to the story and just a weak excuse for why the character is where they are. The rest of the events are completely unrelated to the character. You find many characters related to those events and judge them by either "forgiving" or "condemning" them. Roughly 3 of these characters had the exact same actions, motives and outcomes, none of them were unique at all. There was no challenge to doing any of the options, it was literally just "click A or B to choose what your ending will be later." When the ending came for me it wasn't even really a scene, just "GOOD JOB."

Monster encounters were awful. You can sprint around, dance right behind them, whatever, as long as they aren't looking right at you you're safe, and they basically just walk in a straight line down hallways. The game is overly reliant on jumpscares made through forced camera changes and things just appearing instantly with a loud noise, because there's no real tension in the atmopshere.

Character animations and models were poor at best. Voice acting was bland. The main character was monotone and boring, and a character meant to be creepy and evil just talked like some guy having a casual chat.

Really wish I had've listened to the reviews on this one and never bought it, or at least finished it fast enough for a refund.