Incredible atmosphere, fun and very unique gameplay, pretty engaging narrative and just breathtaking views. Absolutely recommend this to anyone who loves puzzles, exploration and solving mysteries.

A cool, atmospheric and sometimes funny first person puzzle exploration game that is held back by obtuse gameplay and, worst of all, frequent stability issues.

It's clear the developers are taxing the engine as far as it will go and it's led to some areas of the game being borderline unplayable. I'm playing the game on a machine that is well over the recommended system specifications, so the issue seems to be with how overtaxed Source is on this one rather than my machine not being up to snuff. Leads to some areas being filled with frequent crashes to desktop - at their most frequent, I was looking at a hard crash to desktop every few minutes of gameplay, causing me to have to constantly restart the game client.

Also some questionable design choices that are more of a matter of taste - the flashlight and camera are both tied to finite survival horror style resources for much of the game, which seems somewhat at odds with the intent for this game to be a slower paced affair that encourages you to take your time, explore thoroughly and fully take in the sights - the game does massively increase the number of batteries you get later before switching out for a long life flashlight that doesn't need batteries at all, which suggests the developers were well aware the mechanic wasn't particularly well received, or at least wasn't bringing much to the table gameplay wise. The insistence of finite resources against regular puzzle adventure game gameplay continues later, where you're left in a large, buggy area and are given a finite amount of currency that you have to spend continuously to explore, very much not a good idea in my personal opinion!

The positives - MOST of the puzzles are good, make sense and are solvable with a little bit of attention and common sense, a few struggle to convey details to you that are necessary to be solved but almost all can be worked through by just stopping and paying attention to your environment. The voice acting varies from OK to pretty terrible and the story is a mix of grounded and absolutely bonkers - sometimes characters act like reasonable people and sometimes they're space aliens in human form, and it's a bit of a pot luck on how they're going to act at any given moment.

I would normally tentatively recommend this game, however the aforementioned stability issues put this below the threshold for what I would consider a minimal viable product. Check it out if they patch the crashes, but as it stands it doesn't look like it plays well at all on modern hardware.

I love walking simulators and puzzles, but this one did not pass the vibe check. It was taking more and more time to get from one plotpoint to the other the further into the game I got. Same goes for puzzles, they got less and less engaging. At some point I realised I have spent 20 minutes circling one small area trying to find the exit, and I that's where the game ended for me.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game.