Honestly, Genuinely, this is my dream game, and I will continue to shill it for as long as I draw breath. Playing Half Life 2 from a young age gave me specific brain worms about two things: Exploring dilapidated European urban/industrial environments and the vibe of the Source Engine. This game features both of these things in their most extreme. It's all about exploring environments of the aforementioned type, photographing structural damage and finding notes that gradually drip-feed you the surprisingly large scope of the story.

Being released in parts means the story of this thing is surprisingly long and in-depth, with huge, beautifully crafted environments that really just ooze the "Urbexing in cool old places" vibe. Things start off as just you trying to get through the fucking deathtrap places you've been sent into, and escalates into the most insane climax a walking simulator about being a structural analyst ever could.

The sheer amount of hidden stuff you can just stumble across or completely miss makes this game so compelling for multiple playthroughs. My first few times playing through the early part of this game, I missed one of the darkest, most unnerving possible things lying around in an otherwise innocuous place, complete with missable dialogue and all.

Speaking of dialogue, the protagonist is just voiced by Some Dude with a mic of questionable quality, but his remarks and reactions to all the nonsense he eventually goes through went on to endear me towards him way more than I ever expected.

Also, this game features some pretty in-depth puzzles revolving around the various places you visit. Don't let that turn you off if you're not big-brained, though, since they're implemented in a way i'm not sure I've ever seen done before. Since your actual job is just to get in there, take pictures, and get out, the puzzles are designed such that you don't actually need to "solve" them and fix the problem in order to progress. To illustrate, an example of this is the water pumping station early on. To progress, you need to either get a key from one of the pools, or just shut the whole place off and leave via a pipe. However, you could choose to stick around, grab the key, and then reconfigure the whole system to run correctly. Not only is this immensely satisfying, but it has impacts on your playthrough further down the road, in the state of the world reflecting your choice to break the puzzle, leave it as is, or leave it better than you found it. This also plays into the game's multiple endings, giving this game a frankly shocking degree of scale, scope and replayability for a relatively obscure indie title.

Unironically, this game sold me on the concept of a "walking simulator", and I would buy copies of it for everyone I know if I had the money to throw around. If you like Source Engine environments at all, please give this game a shot, it deserves the world.

Bit of a weird one. I thought I wouldn't like the command deck system, but I did. Feels good to build a deck that kicks ass and command styles feel really satisfying. I played this on Critical, so my perspective might be skewed, but on all three playthoughs I hit a wall early on where I felt I needed to grind out my command deck to the state it'd be in for the rest of the game. That grind, three times over, got to be a little mind-numbing. Terra is an idiot and Mickey is an irresponsible monarch, but I came to care strongly about the cast, despite the kinda strange three-playthroughs thing. The command board is the product of a deranged mind and its only saving grace is that it's not required. Terra's Xigbar fight is absurd and can kiss my ass.