11.1 hours played
Written 26 days ago
I just finished the game and I feel wildly ambivalent about it. Tl;dr: I'd suggest playing it for its uniqueness and characters but not promise a satisfying end.
[b]The good stuff is actually really good:[/b]
* The characters (including the world) are interesting and amusing. I laughed aloud several times and I was really sucked into the tangles of the environment and politics. I honestly wish I had even more optional interactions/convo threads with the characters, though, 'cause they were all great.
* The game play loop is interesting; even though it wasn't difficult (outside of some of the clues--I'm not so great with random picture puzzles), I enjoyed exploring all the scenes (notably, including the non-interactive objects) and seeing what was going on everywhere.
* The visuals and apartment layout are interesting and unique.
* The feeling of being digitally free but physically trapped was really well done.
[b]The weird stuff kind of balances my good experience, though:[/b]
Agency feels off. Sometimes it feels like you supposed to be her, deciding options in conversations and holding lives in your hands, but a the majority of the time you definitely are just a backseat passenger on whatever the devs decide Izy is feeling/thinking. That back-and-forth of framing was odd. I also found a lot of the characters (including the bad guys) charming and didn't understand why she made enemies of and insulted literally everyone when she was also a shady character in their shady world.
This goes for the ending, too. The whole last chapter, you have the most information in the game but zero agency on your own feelings about it, a 100% backseat passenger, which made the ending of a pretty great game unsatisfying to me. [spoiler]You spend the game being meticulous about details and to only trust what she figures out herself and then she just completely goes against that. Where's the actual proof Jessie's dead? It feels against her character that she'd just take someone's word for it and go on a "fk it all" vendetta.[/spoiler]
It says choices matter but, outside of staunchly deciding to get as many people killed as possible, it didn't really feel like it and I don't have any drive to replay it.
Why is the heartbeat/eye monitor there if it didn't ever tie into something? Was this leftover from a truncated feature?
My achievements also didn't pop for most of the game and, reading an achievements guide, it's bizarre/hard to tell what even pops most of them if they didn't pop on my play. You can't save at will, either, so I wouldn't suggest going into this game purely as an achievement hunter.