Most accurate depiction of Stockholm I've ever seen

average day of an eastern europen citizen

I am a fan of (let's call it) amateurish horror games. I like to see what they put on display, and try to interpret the creator's intent, because I can often see what they're going for even when things that they do don't work, or parts are missing, or they didn't have the technical ability or resources and had to work around it. I bring this up because I think if you approach things like this in a similar fashion, it totally delivers. Trying to interpret things like you giving the gun to the clearly hostile doctor and taking a permanent health hit meaning that you are trusting the doctor even though it hurts for now, which leads to a better ending shows that it at times makes sense, even if there are similar attempts at this that don't. Maybe it doesn't deliver a horror-horror experience -those aspects never stay with me like it does in things like Silent Hill 4 or the good Doctor Who episodes like Heaven Sent- but it is satisfying nonetheless.

Examples of this include certain labyrinthine map design. Underground sections where the player runs around samey corridors, entire 20 foot-long hallways with no purpose other than seemingly "the level was supposed to be bigger but for the GoldSrc engine memory limitations," and frankly the city section becomes a haze of backtracking and figuring out where to go/what to do after a while. A couple parts break down into you-cannot-finish-this-if-you-make-wrong-decisions; the most recent in my memory is you need to keep carrying the flashlight at one point to get out of an completely unlit set of corridors while being chased by an instakill monster, but you can drop it anywhere. There's no indication of whether you'll need it or not, and since you have only 3 inventory slots at this point (which is actually another thing I like: it both makes sense in the narrative, and they're not afraid to "take away" from the player to increase tension/difficulty), you could be punished for thinking "I need to heal, I need a gun, and I need a melee because while carrying ammo is free, I balanced my usage so I now have limited amounts for either pistol." Best case: you take a long, tedious backtrack of about 10 minutes. My case: it was past a point of no return, so I couldn't even get it back, and had to spend a bit of time looking for flashlight spawning or usable GoldSrc lighting debug commands before just setting the gamma to minimum which did work.

There's also clearly lots of ripoffs influences. Silent Hill clearly being one, as the entire conceit of the story basically imitates 2's but with a different setup, which would work better if so many horror games didn't already try to ape it, including all the bad western-developed Silent Hills after 4. Some of them are just there because "X game did it": there's a scene where you row a boat across a lake for no other reason than "it was a thing in Silent Hill 2"; where SH2's had pacing and intent behind it, this comes across as a copy-and-paste with neither context nor purpose. Similarly, there's the Max Payne dreamlike sequences where you follow the blood path in a completely black area with floating platforms and doors and whatnot, which are just there and not interesting. And some are done better; there's a mechanic (done in Resident Evil 3 originally, from what I can gather) where when you backtrack to reenter a certain room in an apartment, they actually load a different map that combines that room with the corridor so that they can jumpscare you with a monster breaking down the door as you approach it. This works because it plays on player expectations of how a game is supposed to work to add to immersion (i.e. a door is a level load), which I love, and which I didn't expect; I think this is because of the pacing of the previous sections, which shows imo that they put a lot of thought into the setup, and is really well done.

I guess I just have a thing for amateur work that has a lot of heart and soul clearly put into it regardless of the creators' skill and resources. The fact that I didn't feel like it was getting lazy towards the end (when typically people start burning out on projects) demonstrates this well; the worst I can say about the end is it could have used a few more animated shots showing things like Simon being visited by Sophie, getting treated at the mental institution, etc. Where it falls short because of that I can easily forgive because I can do the I-see-what-you-intend thing I mentioned earlier, and it's cathartic to see it when it does hit what it's going for.

There's other things, like many jumpscares which just leave me more annoyed than anything, or engine issues causing light probe bugs, or crashing (I count about ten in one playthrough, but at least save points are generous), or the abovementioned loading-a-different-map causing me to lose items in old maps that I can't return to, but hey, technical game dev is hard even for teams way bigger than this, and it's free, so all you have to lose is time.