Well, this is a very good game. It asks a lot of its character models, and a small team isn’t going to be able to do a whole lot better when it comes to facial animations (which is to say, they’re not so great), but the consistently solid voice acting really helps you forgive that, and to some extent so does the rather elaborate (again, for a small team) character behaviors.
But obviously the concept and the story design are the stars here. I went into it assuming that being set in an underground city and subject to a time loop were clever ways to compact the actual amount of content the team had to make–and they are!–but there are also a couple of spots where the game goes bigger and deeper than you have any reason to expect.
The biggest misstep for me was that they decided to put some combat into a game that’s decidedly not about combat. And for a small stretch in the middle, there’s WAY more combat than there needs to be. They make it clearly skippable, but then you presumably miss seeing a big chunk of the world and really feeling a certain major plot gut punch.
You also aren’t given enough information to control your final outcome completely. I was mostly okay with this, but because I went into the end game thinking I knew what mattered and what didn’t (and was wrong) I didn’t get to see the absolute perfect ending. There’s a surprising amount of adaptability to the final results. I’m going to go read about the other endings now.
Recommended! No reason not to give it a try on Game Pass!