I have a funny feeling there may, in fact, be, someone living underneath the lighthouse

I really wanted to like it but the constant fades to black ruined it for me. I understand the design constraint to avoid animation work and plus games like Silent Hill 3 execute it very well. But when every interaction does that fade and just gets tedious by limitation instead of design.

The game just goes from slow churning horror to repetitive really fast and it really doesn't feel worth it considering it just veers into really familiar lore towards the end.

There are ways to simulate misery within a game without being this constrained. Just letting me see my interactions in real time, no matter how simplistic the animation, would take so much of the constant headaches out.

How do you improve a gloomy, slow, atmospheric game with its central theme being loneliness, and whose gameplay centers around repeating the same few actions over and over again, with each repetition bringing in new creepy anomalies, with the aim to make you worried, not so much about what is happening, but moreso about what *could* happen? If your answer to that question is "Add a big scary spider and a dungeon with lots of blood and stuff", then yeah, maybe you'll enjoy this game.

I have to say, the first few days in this game were absolutely fantastic. To begin with, the early game atmosphere is top notch. The barren island with its three cramped structures and the overcast sky creates such an inescapable sense of abandonement, isolation and mystery. The repetition of the same three or four tasks with a few new spooky obstacles each day gives ample room for terror. Seeing the ink splattered all over the walls and floors while returning from atop the tower, the moths surronding the glass ceiling of the lighthouse, returning to the beach only to see an overturned boat with a cryptic puzzle piece in the middle; events such as those tease the player's mind, forcing it to fill in all the gaps. Even the first full appearance of the aforementionned big scary spider was done well, in my opinion, even if it came too early. It was truly unexpected, and the chosen point of view obscures just enough of it to let one's imagination complete the monster with what they would fear the most.

So, imagine my disappointment, when just a few days in, every single good idea I brought up here had gotten thrown out the window. And in their place? A generic blood-caked dungeon-like arena, a half-baked attempt at a backstory, our boring spider thing in full view, and some the most tedious "hold shift to run" chace sequences I've seen in a while. This isn't just a let down, this basically a whole different game, that somehow got crammed in the middle of something else entirely. The spider sections (both as it and against it) are such enormous chores that it's like the devs were trying to make the game as unenjoyable as possible. The story on the other hand, apart from completely betraying the early game's focus on intrigue, feels utterly shoehorned. A feeling which is amplified tenfold by the complete lack of the mechanical repetition that we saw in the beginning. Those two things are entirely detached from one another.

Overall, this game is a confusing mess, and not in a good way, The developpers had a very faint idea of what they wanted to say, and an ever fainter idea of how they wanted to say it. A shame, because if they had capitalised more on the parts of it that worked, they might have made a truly great horror experience.