Recent reviews by Shar'keem

Very good game if you liked the original (or like old games in general), but also has some issues that the original had which games have since moved on from.

I am one of those people who have some old classics (including the original System Shock) and keep going on about how games were better back then. But then when you actually play one of the old games, you can't help but notice those small things, whether it is wonky controls or old graphics or whatever.
Well, this remake is kind of what I wished it was. It takes System Shock into a proper new engine and rolls with it. Other than that... Well, some changes were obviously made but at least to me it feels quite close to the original. I can see that this isn't for everyone, but I like it. Too many times have I played a modern game, found some note, thought "neat, a puzzle!" only for an objective marker to appear. Not so here! I stopped playing for a couple of weeks and really had to dig through remembering what I had to do next...

Other than that: There are many things I like, some minor things I dont, but overall I can recommend this to anyone willing to work a bit for their fun. It's worth it.

Fun little puzzle game. Figuring out these languages was particularly fun in the very first section, where the first few "free" infos work wonderfully as a kind of tutorial. But in the later sections the figuring out seems to take a back seat, and the last section in particularly seemed like they ran out of interesting ideas to teach these languages. But I still had a lot of fun and think it was very much worth it.

Wonderful puzzle game with well-designed puzzles and interesting design

Awesome metroidvania gameplay. While I would only recommend this to people who are not that concerned with awesome graphics, the pixel style conveys the atmosphere of the station well.

Interesting little game. I can recommend it if a.) you like walking simulators, b.) You like the idea of being alone in space and c.) You can look over some imperfections in the game.
The controls are sometimes a bit on the wonky side, and there is a bit of lack of polish here compared to some other titles, but overall it is still recommendable. For Full Price maybe only for people who are really into the above-mentioned points, but if it's on sale I'd recommend it to anybody.

Short version: I loved this game, despite hating horror games in general. I didn't manage to get through Amnesia, because I just couldn't handle the horror atmosphere, and only got this since I love dystopian sci-fi stuff. And I am really glad I did!

What you will get: An awesomely atmospheric game, that manages to tell quite an intense story in my opinion. It makes you think, and there were several moments where decisions were really hard to make and kept me thinking about their implications for ages.

The downsides (also according to others):
- It is short. I finished it in 7 hours playtime. In my opinion this is not so much an issue, considering I really liked those 7 hours. If you think of a typical game usually having ~15 hours playtime, and full-price releases comign to 60€ in some cases, the price-per-hour is the same, and I recently have not had as much enjoyment from a game as I've had here.
- The enemies are unnecessary. This is the opinion of several people on the forum, I do not agree. While I did have troubles figuring out some enemies' behaviour patterns, and I agree that this game would work without them, the enemies serve the simple purpose of getting a sense of danger. Without them, there would be barely any failure state. I only died to them once, but simply knowing that this is a possibility greatly serves the atmosphere.
- Decisions don't matter. It is true, that this game does not hold your hand as to how your decisions turned out. Nobody tells you afterwards that you were awesome/stupid for acting a certain way. That said, the game gives you the information to think about what you've done - and in some particularly horrible instances after the decision has been made. I spend a lot of time thinking about the decisions and how I would go about them in the next playthrough, so I do think they mattered a lot.