Recent reviews by Insym

Update to the new response from the dev:
With greater reach does come greater responsibility which is why I should always be open and clear with my opinions as it would be irresponsible of me to simply pretend everything is amazing and make people spend their money on things that I personally really didn't enjoy. That's why I'm clear about when I don't like something and don't just say "I hate this it's bad" but say "I hate/don't like this, here's why".
Also about the mediocre streamer comments, first of all you don't deny it, second of all I played the game the second it released because as I said, I've been looking forward to this game for years. I was the only prominent streamer who had played it at that time. It was also one of my greatest complaints: how tedious the finale of the game was. So it was very clearly about me. Pretending that it's not to somehow go "gotcha, this streamer is self centered he thinks everything is about him" is simply pathetic.
For the record, it's obviously not a big insult, it's just completely unwarranted and out of pocket to mention it on your own steam store in a response to someone else. That is not remotely on the same level as just reviewing a game as you are playing it. I know you are passionate because you want this game to be amazing. It's simply my opinion that it's not.

Response to the dev message below:
You must have watched a completely different stream by accident cause there was no mockery or hate. Simply a disappointed fan who waited for the game for two years only to be sorely disappointed for all the reasons I described here and in my end of stream review. Me saying I despise the final boss and then explaining why is not hate, that's criticism and review. Similar for other things I didn't like, I said I didn't like them and explained why. You calling me a "mediocre streamer" in another reply because I didn't like your game is hate. Me explaining in detail why I didn't like something as a response to a product I bought with my own money is called a review. You seem to think that is hate which is disappointing.

Also you might have been scammed if you think non of the art is AI because the photos in the apartment and the eyeballs in the painting puzzle are clearly AI. There are many asset packs online you can buy that are full of AI art without disclosing it. That's why you should educate yourself so you don't end up accidentally spreading AI art in a story about a struggling artist.

Furthermore blaming the player for getting stuck on a slow paced boss fight that is objectively tedious to replay if you die is silly. Similarly for the puzzles. I barely got stuck outside of the last puzzle because of (imo) weird UI design that put me on the wrong foot.

Taking criticism is hard but deflecting everything as "game is not your thing" is not promising.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
The demo was great, I don't know how we got here.

The game starts of with an excruciatingly slow lore dump about stuff that literally never comes back in the rest of the game. At the time I gave it the benefit of the doubt but now I'm extra confused why the pacing was so weird.

The story is (in part) about a mother who loses her ability to do art because she becomes a mother and gets sick. Yet the game is full of AI art which almost has to be parody but I don't believe that. Also in case the dev sees this you are required to disclose AI use on the steam store with the new disclosure feature. I don't see any info on the steam store. Disappointing.

Gameplay wise you solve a handful of puzzles and are done with the story. Which wouldn't have been an issue if it all didn't move so slow. Everything in this game seems to scream "listen to our story it's so important and special" by making all the story animations super slow. It's the definition of "pretentious".

It all culminates in a final boss fight that's truly baffling to me. It is a three phase boss, but every phase is the exact same. Also the boss does random attacks and one of the attacks spawns many mines around the arena, which can make it quite literally unplayable if you get that attack a few times in a row. The mines also don't go away between phases and if you die you start all over. Everything in the boss fight moves so slow. A pipe slowly goes down from the ceiling, you click it, then it slowly goes back up. If you don't beat this first try by luck you'll be sitting there watching the pipe slowly go up and down forever until you lose your mind.

TL;DR this game does not respect your time and if you respect yours I don't recommend it.

DEVS PLEASE FIX THE FFING SPIDER LEVEL HOLY. The game is genuinely amazing, a really interesting spin on the Observation Duty formula. There are 4 levels, 3 of which are super fun and have really interesting entities. BUT THE SPIDER LEVEL IS SUCH BS. Even after knowing exactly what to do it still feels awful to play, I really hope the devs can fix the tutorial on that one and streamline the experience because it's weighing down the rest of the game big time. Since it's early access I am hopeful that a month from now it will be fixed. I highly recommend this game if that gets fixed

This is the best "game inside a game" I've ever played. This game really rewards people who pay attention as there is symbolism and twists eveywhere. This is a perfect example of how games can convey art and story in a way that no other medium can. Try to go in blind without spoilers because things get wild and it's best experienced first hand. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

This game has come a long way. After just finishing 100% achievements I feel it's appropriate to leave a review. This game does something that I've never seen. It gives you a TRUE space exploration. You can walk on a planet, jump into a spaceship, fly into the air and go straight to another planet all without a single loading screen. This is so cool, especially in VR. The exploration of your first few planets and first playthrough in general will be very fun. I had a great time scanning all animals on every planet and finishing each solar system I went to. Being the first in the world to explore certain planets and give them your own names is really fun, especially knowing that others can find them. Similarly it's fun to find stuff others have found first and walk in their footsteps for a little bit. It gives you a weird feeling of not being entirely alone in this basically infinite universe. It's impressive how many discoveries from other people I uncovered even though the game is truly too large for every place to be expored. There must be some clever system that puts people together in certain clusters. This is by far my favorite part of the game. Once the magic wears of a bit and you start actually following the questline things kind of fall apart a bit.

The game is great but suffers from many things. The main one being that the quest system is extremely basic. You just get a waypoint randomly generated, this waypoint is almost always not directly at the target so finding the actual target is annoying every time. Then you get there, do some basic text box talking with NPCs or computers and fly away to the next waypoint. There is no voice acting and almost entirely no choices outside of a few major ones.

So much of the things that you hope matter barely do, such as the language system that the game has. I remember being fascinated and wanting to learn as many words as possible so that I could maybe have conversations with the aliens but none of that ever happens. All you use the language for is getting some basic rewards that you could easily get without learning a single word because the game almost always spoils the answer. This is such a huge missed opportunity and it's quite a shame.

But there are also so many neat things about this game. The freighter system is awesome, having a giant fleet of ships is really cool. Creating many bases on different planets with different resources is very fun. Trading, minmaxing, and making millions upon millions of credits is awesome. The colony system is enjoyable at first until you realise the colony doesn't do anything and gives no rewards. Which is ultimately my greatest con about this game, that it's so poorly balanced. Some achievements require 5 minutes of work to get the maximum "milestone" whereas others require you to stay on an extreme planet for 10 straight REAL LIFE hours. Some mechanics give MASSIVE rewards, such as farming and selling manufactured goods, whereas others give almost entirely nothing, such as the colony mechanic. I wish the game was balanced better and had a more engaging way to interact with the NPCs than just basic text you click through.

The main quest story itself is pretty cool and I actually very much enjoyed the twists and turns. Although it would have been much better with voice acting and better quests that didn't just revolve around go place click button go place click button.

Ultimately I still absolutely recommend this game for the first thing I mentioned: the feeling of true space exploration. Even though some mechanics are shallow this is still a must play for an avid gaming enthusiast. Big props to Hello Games for sticking with it and making the game what it was promised to be.

Absolutely incredible game. Much more scary than I expected. I really love the way the story develops, there are a few minor annoyances but besides that it's an amazingly written story that really has you scratching your head all the way to the end. It made me genuinely interested to look at every detail, find every note, because all of it was yet another puzzle piece to try and figure out what's going on. Even if you're just looking for a pure scary "no brain required" experience I think this absolutely delivers enough scary stuff and surface level story to have a great time. But if you're really invested into the story it becomes even better. Highly recommend to horror fans.

EDIT: The dev updated the store page to now properly disclose that AI voice actors are used. They also removed the "Key feature: Immersive voice acting" which is good. Original review below:

So much of this game is AI generated without disclosing this anywhere on the steam store. Please just have no voice acting rather than totally terrible AI voice acting. Also all the images are AI generated. When the voices and all images are AI you start to wonder if it's all just AI generated and ran through chatGPT with no effort put into it. It says as KEY FEATURE:
"Full voice acting: Experience the story brought to life with immersive full voice acting"
I guess you can just lie about what you put on the steam store but putting that as a "key feature" is crazy.

Also in case the dev reads this: you are required to disclose on your steam page when you use AI to generate content for your game. This is a new steam feature and you do not disclose it.

ATTENTION TO STREAMERS:
DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME ATM. There is a huge security flaw where in Friends Only lobbies people can hack into your game and spam racist words, loud music, etc. It happened to me today and makes this game unplayable for streamers. Please fix ASAP devs.

Edit to respond to the devs: It's not about the yellow paint, it's about that the game is designed with a single path in mind and all possible player creativity is not allowed. There can be a knee high box somewhere blocking off a path and instead of jumping over it you have to go around the entire map. All because there is no yellow paint on the one box. Same thing with the bricks, there are stones EVERYWHERE that the character could throw, but you're only allowed to throw them when they're painted yellow, all other stones are just decoration and your character would rather die than throw them to distract the monster.
Removing yellow paint does not remove the horrible game design. Games should be designed in a way that extreme handholding isn't necessary for your game to be understood by most players. This is a bandaid fix option only there so they can reply to people like me saying "you can remove the yellow paint if you don't like it" rather than making a game where the characters actually act in a way that makes sense.

Original review:
This is the most boring and annoying game I've ever played. The movies were fun but were full of plotholes. Turns out that the game is no different. The characters are so beyond stupid it's incredibly frustrating. I'm going to list some of the things that annoyed me the most:

- For some reason you can't throw any of the rocks that are everywhere. No you have to wait until there are specific YELLOW PAINTED bricks laying around before you can do that.
- Speaking of yellow paint, whoever decided to walk around with HUNDREDS of buckets of yellow paint is a hero, there is yellow paint everywhere you need to go. Which turns the game into a silly and stupid mess. "oh there is a knee high object that we could climb over to get to our objective? Better not go over it because there is no yellow paint, instead let's go around the entire map to get to the same place"
- There are random red painted barrels, cans, and crates EVERYWHERE. Even in the middle of the forest there are cans scattered all around all painted with the same red paint. If you touch these you make sound and the monster probably kills you.
- The main character has asthma which is not in any way important to the story or any character development it's literally only there as a super annoying way to add a stress mechanic which prevents the main character from being close to the monster.
- For some reason there are inhalers and pills laying everywhere, literally randomly on the forest floor.
- Each inhaler can only be used once when inhalers have TONS of uses IRL.
- EVERY SINGLE DOOR in this game is creaky as hell, you have to open them all so slowly. Which is fine at first but when you have to open hundreds of doors to get through the game it's incredibly boring.
- The hitboxes for objects that make sound is incredibly wacky, it's way larger than the object seems. So it's easy to step on something when you were trying to go beside it.
- The worst thing in the game is how the character dies 90% of the time: You will make a sound which will trigger the monster immediately, this will lock the character in a 10 second long death animation just standing there waiting for her death. Not trying to get to safety, throw a distraction, do LITERALLY ANYTHING to survive, no she just stands there and dies because you broke the gameplay rule.
- You can NEVER run in this game. You can never run from the monster to get to safety like a normal person would at least try to.
- I lied, there is a SINGLE chase scene where you are suddenly allowed to run from the monster for 20 seconds. This is the only time in the game the main character decides to run and be smart to avoid a certain death situation. The fact that this chase sequence exists makes the previous points so much worse. At least if there was NEVER any running that would be a consistent rule, but no, the character CAN run away from the monster. She just decides to die 99% of the time instead.
- There is no creativity in this game besides the initial concept of the movie: meaning a world where there are monsters that kill based on sound. The actual gameplay is so uninspired, literally just walk as slow as possible. Throw bricks. Vault ledges. Lay down planks to get over gaps. Bring around fuses. It's all stuff we've seen 100x in much better games.
- The second half of the game is completely lacking any story and there are no character scenes anymore just walking from A to B. It honestly feels like they forgot to add ANY story or conclusion at all into the second half of the game. They set up all these characters in the first half only for none of it to matter at all.
- The ending is so cookie cutter and boring I called it from halfway through the game.

Please do not waste your money on this.

A genuine masterpiece in storytelling. Rarely do you find characters with this much personality. The visuals of this game are cinematic in a truly creative way. I've played hundreds of horror games and this is among my all time favorites. Highly recommend

Leaving a negative review just to push back on the horrible morals in this game. If you are going to include child abuse and even child murder in your game you have to treat the story with nuance and respect. The fact that the only way to get the good ending is to blindly forgive the murderer of your child is ridiculous. I get that we're going down the cliche route of forgiving = good, resentment = bad. But you can choose something inbetween. You can't give a cliche ending like that for a game involving child murder. That's so wildly disrespectful and honestly sickening.