Too many flaws to enjoy a game that should be great.
The map design is confusing and tideous. It is not engaging, it's enraging.
The gun play is crucial - and completely unecessary - but for some dumb reason everywhere in the game.
The story is not interesting, it is boring and sluggish with a lot of nonsensical details on top. Not lovecraftian, just bad writing.

What should be a great game turned out mediocre to bad. The trailer that has hyped us all did not even deliver half of what we could've whised for.

A deeply unsatisfying game. I have read a lot of Lovecraft and understand a lot of what they're going for both in story and in jokes, and very little of it lands.

The main issue is the gameplay. I don't mind the combat as much as others but it does quickly get very tiresome as enemies are bullet sponges that don't respond to tactics or being shot in any way. I recommend putting it on Easy just so you can shoot them without exhausting all your resources every time.

But the detective stuff is no better. It largely boils down to wandering around rooms looking for arbitrary points the developers have decided should be interactive, and if you want the "All Evidence Found" tick on a crime scene, that means finding completely unintuitive stuff like the one book on a shelf that's more interactive than the others, or a music box that has nothing to do with the case but for which your character has a snarky one liner. By the end of the game I was just looking it up half the time because I couldn't be bothered mashing my interact button while running to and fro.

Then you go into your supernatural senses and have to put a few different scenes in order, which is either incredibly obvious or blindingly meaningless - and you have to wander between each point and listen to each voice line over and over again to do it. Tedious in the extreme.

If you're thinking the story might redeem it, it doesn't. There's the hint of a Lovecraft story in there, but the atmosphere fails to capture the imagination and it's mind-boggling how little your character responds to anything with any degree of sense. He's completely unperturbed the first time he encounters a literal eldritch monstrosity and will pass basically no comment on it (or really any of the wildly insane things he has to do or encounter throughout the game), but as soon as he comes across some humans who are "persecuting" someone (supposedly for being from Innsmouth, which if you've read Lovecraft, is basically an entirely valid reason. But more importantly, they're members of the evil eldritch cult you're hunting so it's kind of justified), Charles Reed starts yelling at them (while surrounded by them) until they shoot him. I'm not saying they're good guys, but given the game opens with a disclaimer that it tries to be truthful to Lovecraft and portrays some of his more unacceptable opinions, it would be good if Reed could get his priorities in order.

All in all, given I'm a huge fan of the genre and definitely the target audience, I was bored stiff by the end - which does not provide a satisfying conclusion but offers a choice of three endings which wrap up instantly and don't really add much to the rest of the game.

I basically only finished it for completion's sake.

this game is really hard imo