The Thing on an oil rig. Great concept! Brilliant voice acting and sound design. Stunning visuals that I would say are truly "next-gen". The oil rig feels like such a lived-in, real location, and the characters all feel like real individuals with flaws. Very well optimised too, on Unreal 5 no less (consistent 60fps on i9-9900k and 3070)

Not too scary, so even scaredy-cats like me can complete it in a few sessions. Narrative has a lot of forward momentum, so you never feel bored. Completed the game in about 5,5 hours. Highly recommended!

Great art direction and atmosphere, ruined by complete and utter garbage gameplay. Meaningless and repetitive quicktime events, clumsy platforming, trial and error sections in near-complete darkness, scuffed underwater levels where movement just stops working randomly, and many more idiotic bugs and design choices that make it really hard to care about the horror aspect of the game. It is so bad it's infuriating at times.

The "interactive" part of this interactive media is so terrible they should've just dropped it completely and released a 4 hour long cutscene taking you through the entire story and it would make for a much more enjoyable experience.

Sometimes I regret that Steam only has a Yes or No review system. This is one of those times.

So, I'll start with all the things I liked about this game.

The game looks incredible and the monster design is really inspired. The voice acting is really good and I found it refreshing to have a game with so many scottish actors. The setting is incredibly effective as a horror setting, quite able to induce a fear of isolation, the dark and the water.

That's about it. I found the gameplay quite shallow. The enemy encounter were of two varieties: scripted chase scene where you pretty much hold forward and vault when necessary and very easy hiding sequences. The "puzzles" were also extremely easy, if we can even call them that. This, however, is quite common in horror games like this (outlast and amnesia have pretty much the same gameplay, although I find in those games the enemies are more of a menace).

The story was also quite shallow, and I find that much more disapointing. In the first 10 minutes of the game you find out all your character is: A man with a loving wife and daughters who got in a fight with a guy and begrudgingly had to ♥♥♥♥ off to an oil rig with his best friend while thing "calmed down" at home. That's it. He does not change from that, we don't find any depth about his life or relationships. The monsters in this game seem to have some hallucinatory properties. You think the story would use this to show the depths of the main characters mind. But no, all hallucinations or flashbacks show the same: You're a man with a loving wife and daughters who got in a fight with a guy and begrudgingly had to ♥♥♥♥ off to an oil rig with his best friend.
And forget about the rest of the characters getting any plot relevance or depth. You meet most of the workers in the beginning 10 minutes and later find half of them already dead. Every dead body that I find, the main character has to say his name out load to remind me he has a connection with them. And the ones still alive only exist to say one thing: "♥♥♥♥'s ♥♥♥♥♥♥ man. Here's what you gotta do now."
Okay, so what about this game's themes? I... don't really know. I mean, there's the obvious envorinmentalism, and some anticorpo messaging with how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ the oil rig is maintained. And that's it. Maybe I'm just dumb, but I can't tell you any other themes or concepts this games explores.

All in all, I would say: "If you can get it for $12 or less, it's an interesting couple hours experience (I beat the main game in 4 hours). Not for more than that."

I still have the DLC to play. Maybe I'll play that and see if it's any better.