Well this one was a surprise I must say!

If you had told me you had a survival horror style game where the main character is a Scottish dude on an ocean oil rig in the 70's, I cant say I would feel too excited about that.

However as it turns out, this unlikely premise for a great game actually has ended up being one of the most atmospheric and engrossing horror games I have played in a long time. This genre has been done to death at this point and having tried quite a few of them myself, I feel like the majority are mediocre at best to outright garbage tier.

This one sat on my wishlist for some time before I finally looked at it again and noticed this was made by The Chinese Room, who also made Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a walking sim that was also very well done and that I enjoyed a lot for what it was.

The voice acting is fantastic in this one, something about Scots that comes across so authentic and down to earth and the cast of characters are all entirely believable and convincing in their roles in the story. The settings are eerie without being tacky and using the usual cheap scare tactics you get in a lot of other less well constructed games than this.

Levels are well thought out and it mostly has you knowing very clearly where you are to go next with very minimal back tracking so it doesn't get tedious as other slow games can tend to do for me personally. It does use yellow markers to indicate climbable ledges and so on, though in this game it is subtle enough (and helpful) to not make you feel like you are being completely patronised. There aren't any real puzzles as such too, which is fine by me as I find too many puzzles also gets tedious.

For a non AAA title, the graphics in this game are fantastic, though it is pretty demanding so lower end PC's may need to dial back the settings a bit, though you wont need high refresh FPS as there is no actual combat and the game is slow paced almost all of the time. Sound quality is great, something I think most horror games do well, plus I should mention I often turn off music in games as I can find it overbearing and distracting, however in this game I left it on as it never took over and killed the immersion for me.

Overall I think if you love this genre then this is a must play, it is relatively short and I have seen complaints about the price but I feel you can buy countless mediocre horror games that may be longer and cheaper, but I would rather a shorter but far higher quality experience even if it costs a bit more and this most definitely is a quality experience.

If I had to look for downsides... well, I still don't really know what exactly it was that they encountered on the oil rig (avoiding any spoilers here) and a few deaths were just time wasting/cheap, as it wasn't a 'skill issue' kind of thing (or was it lol?) but rather you have to observe a ledge or a mouse click/button hold you simply have to die a few times to figure out but even then it isn't the end of the world.

Highly recommended if you are a fan of the survival horror genre, one of the best out there in my opinion.

I do recommend but there are caveats.

It is a typical horror/walking simulator with forced tense moments and lots of little things to do in between.

The things I liked, the environment was great, the setting was phenomenal, the crew was interesting, the attention to detail on the rig was really something to behold and the adventure was over pretty quick.

The things I didnt like, there were too many little bugs, didnt run on Proton very well, I got stuck on beams or other places far too often resulting in a restart and the monsters ended up just being more obnoxious than anything (though I do appreciate they were usually only short running sequences).

Overall a good game but between performance issues and I wasnt a fan of the monster AI, I would not have paid the full price I paid for the game knowing what I know now.

As always, Chinese Room delivers. Impactful stories with simple but engaging gameplay. I highly recommend it for everyone who likes psychological horror and tought provoking stories.

Also, the achievements are funny, you get them for being bad at the game! :D Dying in different ways and being a perv... (McLeery)