6 people found this review helpful
3 people found this review funny
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 3.9 hrs on record
Posted: 1 Jan, 2024 @ 4:57am

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not a legal threat.
This game is terrible. In its story, game engine, several of the puzzles, and with predatory pricing. (The review has some minor spoilers.)

The puzzles use some creative mechanics, and the few puzzle mechanics it does have are well designed. My opinion is the puzzles have so much more potential and it's only barely explored, mostly spent on puzzles more focused on tedium and requiring precise inputs. Precise inputs for puzzles are bad game design, and as I was playing on a keyboard, I found some particular ledges to jump off were extremely difficult because the keyboard ledge momentum is handled differently for keyboard versus controller. There are long delays for animations for the mechanics later in the game, I found I was constantly fighting the camera well before the game mechanic which affected camera control, and the poor respawn placements for some of the longer puzzle chains made me feel like I was wasting time.

The game engine does not seem to be able to properly load saves. After loading a save, me and my friend experienced frequent screen tearing and frame skips. In some cases one of us would die because the game jumped ahead a couple of seconds. The options are extremely limited; just "display" (which I think is to select monitors in a multi monitor setup, as clicking it does nothing for me), language and two audio sliders. if you don't play on the popular 1920x1080 resolution it renders poorly as other reviewers have mentioned.

I suppose some people may find the story interesting, but right from the beginning it was incredibly boring to me. It felt like I was listening to an actual person's thoughts coming home from a 9-5 wage slave job. It really did not get much better; tropey, unimaginative dialogue that could have been written as a high school assignment. Arguably the best parts of the story started roughly 30% into the game in segments where players are shared with asymmetric information and told not to communicate, leading up to decisions both players have to make. But there are extremely few of these and they have basically inconsequential effects on the story.

Regarding predatory pricing: In a landmark 2017 Australian supreme court case, it was found that Valve misled Australian consumers by forbidding refunds, and from when it was initiated in 2014 to its resolution it has seen a ripple effect in Steam's new refund policy -- which I think without further context, players may mistakenly view it as Valve being benevolent when they just tried to avoid liability. What has happened for this game, is that the price during early access was twice of at its release with friends pass, meaning only one copy is needed. By changing it to require two copies to play and not issuing refunds to early access purchasers in Australia, the developers are likely to be violating Australian consumer law, which requires that Australian consumers "are entitled to a replacement or refund from the retail supplier of the video games for a major failure and for compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage." Although this is a small indie game and unlikely to attract legal attention, I do think this bait-and-switch predatory pricing is becoming more frequent, and I wonder if in my lifetime I will see a new precedent set prohibiting it. The specific pricing of the game is irrelevant to the fact that at minimum, the developer's decision is legally questionable and morally reprehensible. Early access games are largely played, bought and viewed similar to full release games, they generally have no special legal liability exceptions, and it will take a long time for Valve to (if ever) really admit this but it's largely an open secret in my view.

To me, this game reflects the kind of quality that I would see in a free flash game in the 2000s. If the art direction was taken further, the story was less unbearably mundane+unrealistic+tropey and a sane game engine was used I think it would have far more potential.
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