Recent reviews by Sephurik

I'm not a particularly huge fan of survival games, but I love a good mystery and adventure and this appeared to be a good mix of elements. I had no idea what to expect when I started this, and hadn't heard of it until it released, and I have to say I am really impressed and fully recommend this game, it is well worth the full price. More specifics are below.

Edit: Added computer specs, approximate performance and fixed some typos.

• Graphical Fidelity is great. It isn't the prettiest game out there but is has its own style and feel and it is well fleshed out. Game performs well on midtier hardware.
  
  
• Audio quality is top notch. The sounds are high quality, the music is intertwined with cues and ambience, creating very moody atmospheres, creepy and foreboding moments and refreshing and calm periods. Caves sound like caves, storms sound like storms. You will learn the various audio cues for different things, be it threats, weather, puzzle completion or secret discovery. I cannot overstate just how well the audio matches up to every moment in the game.
  
  
• Options are plentiful and includes resolution scaling (supersampling). Difficulty is a slider and I assume adjusts rates of hunger and thirst and frequency of weather events and such things. Borderless Fullscreen Windowed Mode is supported but as of this writing isn't an option in the options screen but can be set in a config file, hopefully this will be made selectable in game.
  
  
• Exploration is just as much a part of the game as survival. Level of involvement is largely in your control. Many secret areas exist and offer additional lore bits, but you are fully free to ignore those and only focus on the storyline. Exploration does tend to better prepare you, and exploration never goes unrewarded.
  
  
• Will have VR support eventually. VR support is present but is still very 'work-in-progress' as of this writing. Beyond this I cannot comment as I do not own any VR hardware.

• Narrative and Story design is phenomenal. I was very engaged with the game, and as I progressed I only found myself wanting to know more and more importantly discover more. I think this is an excellent example of game writing that does much more showing than telling. You see your environment, you discover things, some lore bits scattered throughout the world are picture based only, and hint at various dangers or terrain that you might later face. Very little dialogue exists, and the physical world gives you just as much information as your one basic forward objective does, if not more. There is a mystery to unravel, but at the same time the game does not reveal everything. Space is given for interpretation and speculation, and maintains mysteriousness and creepiness of the game from start to finish.
  
  
• The game does not hold your hand. There is almost always a forward vector that gives you a very general direction, but exactly how you get there is never explicit. Weather is unpredictable when you are outside, and your journey requires you to survive. The planet you are on is not nice. The game is fair, however. There are plenty of resources scattered about, and sleeping also saves the game. Most arduous areas usually have a save and camp spot before them, so that you have the opportunity to mostly focus on what you're doing, at least for a little while.
  
  
• Level design is incredible and uses the environments to their full extent. Some areas become accessible later, and even backtracking through some areas later in the game will reveal something new or changed. Things you do have an impact as areas that were blocked off early on will be accesible after you do things in the story. All areas as far as I know can be gotten back to, with some travelling if you're up to it. There is no map in the game, but this is made up for with some subtle and some not so subtle landmarking. Areas have literal milestones that will tell you about how far you are through a particular area. Other things can also mark areas, such as markings or arrangements on the ground, to simple stacks of rocks in caves.
  
  
• The game is excellent at evoking real creep. There aren't really any directly malicious threats in the game, but the game does a great job of making you feel otherwise. Some areas I was hesitant to enter, or was hesitant to activate some mechanism just because I was somewhat afraid of something happening that might not be pleasant.

i5-4670K Stock Clock/Boost, Hyper 212 Evo
MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 970 (OC'd 150 MHz)
2x8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 RAM
MSI Gaming Z87-G45 Mobo
Windows 10
OCZ Vertex 4 and Samsung 850 Evo SSDs

Average 60+ FPS in all areas with max settings in Borderless Fullscreen Windowed Mode, as well as up to 140% render scaling (supersampling). A couple of areas with many light sources may drop below 60 FPS with above 120% render scaling. 1920x1200 Native monitor resolution.