The core mechanic of the game is pretty cool. You move elements of a puzzle around to shine light onto other parts to activate them which gives you more parts to move until you eventually light up whatever the goal piece is. I do, generally, like that idea but I'm not sure it's strong enough to build an entire game around (even a game as short as this one). A handful of the puzzles I feel like I solved on accident by just moving things around. And a few other puzzles felt way too finicky, where I'd have to make very small and precise movements to just barely get a sliver of light onto the goal.

The writing in the game is okay. A story about some kind of underground bunker with a 'weird' religion in a post-apoc wasteland. I honestly stopped reading most of it after the second trial because it's all kinda mediocre and there's kind of a lot of it.

I really like the idea here: having a conversation with passengers in your car but only speaking through images instead of words. Unfortunately, I think this game kind of fails at achieveing that because the emoji you choose from are selected randomly and the 'responses' from your passengers just seem to be related to the one you pick. So it never feels like there's any sort of coherent conversation happening. Also, I think the toonwave glitch aesthetic sucks and, even when I had it turned way down, it made the game hard to look at.

This game is a whole lot like Escape from Tarkov except better because you can actually play as a woman.

Edit: Okay okay I'll do a bit more of a 'real' review now that I've put quite a few more hours into Vigor instead of just being snarky about a different game.

I really like the idea at the core of this game of going into an area, looting things, maybe running into other people, and choosing between ignoring them, fighting them, or maybe even befriending them. That is such a cool idea for a video game! It combines the satisfying base of pickin' up things and using them to make other things with interesting social dynamics! Maybe you'll make a new friend while you pick up things or maybe you'll make a new enemy! Who knows! And it could be different every time you play. But that's only in theory. In practice, you loot stuff until a person sees you and you get shot to death because nearly everyone I encountered shoots on sight.

It wouldn't have been too bad if I had continued to be matched up with the people I was running into early on. They were just as scared and bad at shooters as I am, so it was a pretty fun way to play! Unfortunately, I eventually made my way into a higher matchmaking bracket and started playing against absolute killers. My survival rate tanked and the amount of loot I was able to get away with dropped precipitously which made my progress of rebuilding my Norwegian cabin slowed to a crawl.

I also want to note: this game is free to play and has several spots where you can stuff real money in for various things and it doesn't seem particularly better or worse than any other game with similar monetizations? A battle pass, cosmetic skins, lootboxes, all that stuff but it's all about as equally garbage as it is in any other game these days. I'm not sure if that's a plus or a minus, so I'll let you decide on that one.

Between all that plus the long queue times (5+ minutes to get into a ~10 minute long match) means that I think I value my time too much to play any more of this. It was an okay time. I've played worse. But I could also be playing so much better. So I think I will.