I was kind of in a funk on Friday night, and the trailer caught my eye on Youtube, and the story, atmosphere and setting really appealed to me. Apparently though, it’s an Epic Games Store exclusive, which gave me pause, since I had never bought anything there before, nor had I even claimed a single free game.
I believe there may be some reviews for this game up on Youtube, but of course none were on EGS, and none were on Steam. So rather than do any research, I was feeling reckless enough that I threw caution to the wind and bought the game at full price ($29.99) without knowing anything about it really, other than that the trailer brought a very strong Bioshock vibe. Which is fine with me.
I’m midway into Chapter 4 now, and here are some of my impressions:
- Cannot rebind the keyboard, nor could I find any instructions (aside from a few sparse in-game prompts) as to which key does what. For instance, I still don’t know if I can crouch, aside from the context-driven QTE crouching. Nor do I appear to have a flashlight, which would be really handy. Fortunately, most controls seem to adhere to common FPS controls. WSAD, spacebar to jump, mouse buttons for action, etc.
- It’s supposed to be a horror game, but thus far I’m not getting horrified much. A few decent light jump-scares, and the creepy factor is fairly high, but so far nothing that has scared me at all, really. Note that there is a fair amount of gore in places, but nothing taking place in real time. i.e. You don’t see it happening; only after-effects.
- Atmosphere is excellent. Great stormy-night effects, particularly in Chapter 1. Now that I’m inside the ship, I am really down deep inside the ship. I would like to see outside once in a while. It’s getting claustrophobic in here. Hopefully this will get fixed as I move onward.
- Terrific Art Deco design. Love it. I did lose some confidence in the second room in Chapter 1, where there’s a world globe on display, which looks nice enough until I realized they had pasted the artwork onto it backwards, so it’s a backwards globe, countries, words, everything. This happened again in a library, where some printing on book spines were reversed so that the sets of books didn’t all look the same.
- Less terrific level design - Seems pretty standard so far.
- QTE chase scene: This bit had me messed up for a long time, until I finally figured out that you use the QTE mouse-click for the first jump you need to do, and for the second jump, you have to use the actual jump key (spacebar), even though it gives you the identical QTE prompt both times.
- Puzzles: There are some. Most are deceptively easy to the point that I got stuck once because I was massively over-thinking the thing. Also, there’s a part where you need to turn the back-up generator on. Half an hour later, you need to turn the back-up generator back off. Took me a long time to figure out that I could not do this at the same big generator control panel I used before. You must use the control panel on the other side of the ship. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but I don’t think that’s fair, simply stupid, so I’m trying to save someone some frustration.
- The voice actors are very good, maybe even excellent. The main character (you) does a beautiful job, which was a huge relief to me. Sometimes I can actually enjoy bad voice acting if it’s bad enough, but when the rest of the game feels as good as this, you want it to be good. And it is.
- Story: I’m really liking what they’re trying to do here, and there are plenty of newspapers and notes scattered around to fill in the general idea, although I do wish more detail was available. It does seem very vague at the moment, and I’m hoping for more as I continue.
- Gameplay: There’s no shooting, and not a lot else to do aside from the puzzles, but it’s not quite a walking simulator. The puzzles are easy, but still kind of fun in a casual game sort of way.
Summary: This was exactly the kind of game I was looking for at that specific time, so I’m not disappointed. However this is not the kind of game I usually play. I’m much more action-oriented, but I’m noticing more and more as I get older that games like this (along with the new Call Of Cthulhu) are appealing to me more often as I search for something to calm me.
So if you’re looking for something to relax with, this should suit you.
