I wish I could give both thumbs up and down.

There´s a lot of good ideas in this game, but the execution is flawed, sometimes seriously so.
To get it out of the way, I am of the opinion that if you make a lovecraftian game, you skip the humour or make it a persiflage alltogether. Neither was done here. The jokes and fun are only there in the first act, which is strange and doesn´t even have the effect of making the rest of the game feel more dire.

There´s not really much in the way of puzzles but when there is one...holy hell, can it be frustrating.
Timed puzzles can be challengig if done right (they seldom are), but here I think they don´t work. The implementation of new control elements would fit the respective scenes very well and would add to the feeling of the situations, but they should be introduced beforehand without having to die over and over, not having the time to figure anything out. The way its done here, I don´t think its working well.

Small bugs and glitches occur throughout the game, like item descriptions or voice lines being played twice after clicking only once. Also, after an item changed its place in the inventory or had been combined with another one, its description was still read when clicking on its former slot/another item.
Not terrible, but could be done better.

There are graphical flaws but I´ll cut them slack here, it´s overall executed good enough and the style is pretty spot-on.
The voice acting can be over the top sometimes, but it´s really solid and again, most of the time you can hear there´s a real effort behind it.
There are little cutscenes, one of them with close-ups on two characters. Sadly, the pixel art takes a drop here where it could have really shone.

The team behind the game seems to have put in both love and effort and clearly knows the classics, but not quite how the classics wrought their magic of storytelling with well-executed controls and puzzles. I hope the mountains of madness game learned from the mistakes made here.

Still, it´s a thumbs up for now, you gotta learn to walk before you can run after all.