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This game is amazing at what it is trying to do. At the end it starts becoming rather bothersome and it starts falling down the cliff in quality. However, very few people can appreciate for what it is and cult classics either never get popular or get popular way after their release. Walking simulators rarely garner an audience, but if you are in a market for one, this one is damn good one.

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Games which try something new often fail. People want something which they know and is comfortable for them. There are various players and different niches, but they all tend to conglomerate towards few optimal games which they like and gaming industry starts revolving around those axies. While game like these are strange, alien and thus unattractive to most people.

1. Best horror game - Alien Isolation flopped in sales and it took many years to catch one.
2. Aliens Dark Descent. The unique and competently made game didn't sold.
   
3. Spec Ops the Line. Game flopped on release and it took many years and word of mouth through a decade even to get going.

It is one of those rarest of gems in gaming which tries to push gaming as media forward and does it well. Sadly, humanity doesn't appreciate unique, well made experienes. It takes ages to get ball rolling and people who are trying something new are likely not getting paid at the end of a day. This is reality which gamers had created. Even talking to people which didn't liked, to people which supposed to know better. They just don't have a clue how to evaluate product like this. Their critiques are nonsenscial, inconsistent and irrelevant for game such as this. That is most disappointing is when you see people, gaming enthusiasts which should know better instead having an unfounded opinion and betraying their own principles by not exploring gaming media when it presents itself in its best lights. It is like women like to say. I'm not mad at you, just disappointed. This is how I feel towards humanity, towards gamers and developers. I'm not mad at you, I just thought we were just so much better than we proved to be as the species.

Scorn is wrongly critiqued for a lot of reasons. Bad combat, confusing puzzles, being boring. All of those reasons are fundamentally flawed. For one, you are not a soldier. You are civilian. Combat is supposed to be clunky like in many similar games. Nor majority of this game requires you to fight. You can just sneak past everyone and enemies won't chase you at all nor they can catch up with you. People having troubles with combat are same ones who find puzzles confusing. Sure, game could give some clues and introduce them better, but puzzles are few and straightforward. It requires you to think and a lot of people just fail at that. This is why I'm disappointed in people when I hear such complaints. It is also a puzzle for me when people complain about game being boring. I cannot fanthom how clueless you have to be in order to buy a walking simulator and be frustrated that gameplay is about engaging with the world and enjoying its atmosphere.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365746768
I did enjoyed gameplay immensely. I was absorbed in this world. Exploring every room, taking in the atmosphere. I enjoyed game for what it is and it was awesome. Couldn't get enough of it. However, gameplay tends to start strong and then to gradually fall down and down with sharp decline in a last chapter. You are here to explore alien world, to see sights and to get immersed in an atmosphere. However, game fails to offer new vistas, presenting new ideas, give player cluess about its world. It starts as great as it ever going to get and you see all what there is to see in 1/3 of its length. All the rest becomes more and more tedious. First, you are exploring an equivalent to an alien train station. It might be alien, but even alien office buildings believe me or not are boring. So you are forced to how through unifrom alien rooms with highly forgetable layouts until you reach bottom of the station.

Then game really gets most in your face. As it is of course the hive with highest concentration of enemies which should never be a centerpiece of this game. Yet, you are bound to walk in circular coridors full of those little critters. This is when game starts feeling like a game. Previously enemies felt like real creatures. They weren't here to be your mortal enemies. They were just doing their thing and you were doing your thing. If you stayed out of their sights, they had no interest in pursuing or attacking you. However, in this segment, you have to interact with terminals which for some reason summon them. This is frustrating, because it takes away from the immersion of a real world. Then game pulls a dirty one on you. There is an ammo terminal in a corner. If you interact with it, it spawns two behemoths on each end. It is a cheap way to kill a player and you essentially need to take a hit and run through one to the exit. To see cheap tricks like this in a long and exhausting section really had hurt an impression that I had. This was a first sign of things to come.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365791502
Then you finally take the train out of there, you go to the last chapter of a game. You see remaining natives who recently had ascended. That ascension is short sighted and story at this point becomes gibberish. Developers also couldn't be satisfied with amazing architecture and art which they made, so they drew people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on each corner. This is where they couldn't hold on anymore and revelead their true colors. Then gameplay became very convoluted, asking to interact with specific terminals to do poorly explained things. Immersion that it is a real world started falling apart. It didn't helped that you were greeted with a boss fight. While boss design is fine, it is however confusing fight which is more tedious and unnecessary than anything else. Cherry on top of all of this is its ending. It ceased making any sense and just to spite you, it is one of those unsatisfying endings which explains nothing and leaves you feeling like you had achieved nothing.

I go in depth analysing game's writing here:
In Depth Story Analysis

To me this game spoke in a lot more ways than one. I played the game, engaged with the community, read artbook for this game and what developers explained about their game. It just made me disappointed in everyone. Gaming community for one proclaims that they want unique and good games, but they rarely support such projects. Their lips say one thing, but their eyes betray them. All they want is to play Counter Strike or Call of Duty all day. Even our critical thinking about the art ends up with "hehe, interface has a hole thus it means vagina. We live in a failed society and even people who are supposed to be better are actually no better. They close down in their comfortable games which offers them nothing new. They talk big, but their actions make them no better than anyone else.

My greatest disappointment is for developers themselves. They did created an amazing experience...until the last chapter. They were creating this elaborate work and I was impressed that they could harness Giger's work and make something out of it. And then last chapter had hit with penises and sex everywhere. It saddened me. It made me believe that artists can try to express something more than sex. However, they ended up just as very sophisticated school boys wanting to draw sexual organs and giggle about it. They held it for as long as they could and then they just splurged their load. It made me genuinely sad. Is this what humans limits are? Don't anyone else, but me want to express complex thoughts, emotions, feelings? Is it only me who can appreciate beauty of decaying world without wanting to draw a penis for giggles? I appreciated game's art for what it was and felt it as self-sufficient, but developers proved that they couldn't just create a pure game. A pure idea where they try to put you the day after tommorow of civilization going extinct.

I was also disappointed by creators of this game. In their artbook, they cannot create such a world. They simply lack the capacity to imagine world such as this. In their artbook, developers state that they put ideas simply out there to be explored. They throw various thoughts and ideas to just ponder about. It is like trying to create a metaphor from everything around you. Oh, you had ate an apple. You know what? There is a deep meaning there. Apple grew from Earth and you ate it. We are all connected and stuff. This is the level of intellectual pondering we are engaged with. These artists cannot create coherent world, they borrow everything from Giger and they cannot add anything on their own. They simply lack capacity in creating a different kind of world with its own logic and rules. Everything we see in this game are there just as an open question. Nothing has any meaning.

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This game set up to do one thing and it does that one thing very well. You see game like this several times in a decade. Something which is well executed and does something genuinely unique. It starts falling apart at the end and developers were incapable of giving you anything more than empty pondering. However, if you have patience for games such as these and have imagination to immerse yourself into this world, I highly recommend it. There is nothing like this in gaming industry which would match the idea and quality of this game's execution.

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Calicifer's Reviews

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