The movement feels really good in this game! Oftentimes you can just schmove your way through sections that you're not supposed to, which feels great but also makes it just a tad more difficult to find where you're actually supposed to be going. The lack of a map and general signposting didn't bother me so much since it's such a short game, but I can imagine it gets frustrating if you take a longer time between play sessions.

The combat is probably the weakest point in this game. There's no stagger and a general lack of "juice" (as much as I hate that term being used to describe a set of effects that really shouldn't be as universal as people claim they should be) to the attacks. The disarming mechanic is never properly explained or required to progress, which is a shame since it's one of the things I really wanted explored more since the developer's past jam game STRATO-SPEAR. The menus also are really lacking in polish, especially the settings one which feels really clunky to navigate with a gamepad (and the resolution and windows settings don't seem to work at all sometimes).

There's some really cool things in this game that distract from the fact that the open world is empty and most of the gameplay time is spent traveling between the different objectives. The game both lets me one-shot incredibly lore-powerful characters, or too hard and do almost no damage to strong regular enemies with the element they're weak against. The whole relationship between humans and pawns was the most interesting part of the game for me and I'm glad it was tackled more in depth in the DLC dungeon.

Pretty cool! Mechanics wise, it's pretty much Minecraft parkour mechanics except with better bouncing and worse ladders. Everything controls pretty consistent, except the poles/ropes/shafts that my character always lets go at random no matter how hard I'm pressing the crouch key. It does have that Getting Over It game design of losing all your progress in a single jump, so it's in no way accessible and that's a shame because the environment is really pretty and the music is good too before you've listened to all 2-5 tracks.

The horror aspect... It's kinda cool that it's there, but it doesn't really work for me 100%. Like, it's REALLY unlikely that you're going to get enough vertigo playing the game normally to make the creepy things have a decent chance of spawning. It's kinda scary when you intentionally look for it the first time, but it's very simple so it gets old after two or three times. Which I'm thankful for, I think keeping it as scary atmosphere with a shadow guy once in a while (which seems to be different for every player or playthrough!) is a really good way to go at it. But it's kinda doomed to not land right - be too aggressive and the horror distracts you from the already nightmarish jumps, be too mild and... well, the game as it is currently.

I don't want to be too mean about this since it's a free game and it's clearly a passion project, but it just didn't click for me.

At first I was excited because there seemed to be no obvious "oooh scary monster chases you!", which is my biggest turn off in any backrooms or liminal space inspired media. And it was really cool! The environments are diverse enough, the giraffes are cute and there's sort of a plot happening. Then the mannequins turned into oooh scary mist monster and I clocked out mentally.

The ending was fine and the CYOA twist was pretty good, but the SCP reveal kind of soured things for me once again. I really love SCP, I think mixing backrooms and SCP makes sense (backrooms wiki lore is just worse SCP anyways), but this is the coldest, most generic, most boring take on the foundation ever. They're cold and they do unethical experiments and terminate their D-class. Really? What is this, series 1?

Overall an okay experience compared to a lot of other backrooms media, but it just wasn't for me.

The controls are both more fluid but also worse than you're expecting. Strafing and dashing feel pretty good to do, but moving your camera at all feels like a nightmare. The customization aspect is pretty good too, the UI and weapon names aren't very intuitive at all when helping you decide if you should buy something, but the fact that you get a full refund when you sell something makes experimenting pretty fun if you're willing to crawl through the menus. I don't know if it was my copy of the game or if it's always like this, but most areas had no music.

The narrative is pretty interesting, I really wasn't expecting them to be so direct about the anti-corporate themes! That coupled with the debt and human plus systems makes for a pretty immersive experience, if not a slightly miserable one. The misery increases tenfold on the last few quests, unfortunately, and not in a cool thematic way. They throw some maps and enemies at you that... kinda assume the game is more fluid and has more potential to be more cinematic than it actually does. The best maps in this game are the large open ones with obstacles to hide behind, not the long hallways and hellish mazes and ABSOLUTELY NOT the final level's vertical moving platform climb and narrow shaft arena. Would have given it a 4 if not for this last 1-2 hours of gameplay. The cutscene has that characteristically "throwing ideas at the lore until fans pick it up" From Software vibe - it was pretty funny looking up what it meant online after finishing the game and seeing someone say "they remade this game 3 times I don't think even they think it's worth figuring out".

Aside from some confusion about where you start on the map and some collisions the game didn't warn me about until I had already crashed, this game is really solid and I had a blast getting through it! Even though your only real environment is the inside of the sub, it really does feel like you're immersed in an alien moon from the atmosphere and the little glimpses you get through the camera. I wish the final scare was as good as some of the other anomalies you get to see, it's a bit lame in comparison.

Pretty alright! This feels like a sandbox of ideas for completely different platforming games that don't exist. None of them go too in-depth which is kind of disappointing when you find one that you really like. The controls felt a little clunky - double tapping to dash works really well on the D-Pad (the intended movement buttons), but everything else doesn't. Couldn't care much about the story, it's one of those "we're making fun of tropes here" things but it still tries to keep you emotionally invested somehwo which didn't work for me. The graphics are really cool, mixing 2D and 3D in a way that looks goofy at worse and stunning at its best.

Love the creature designs in this game! My favorites have to be the cylinder servants, they look so ominous and distinct and I love the fusion of human + human technology with the obscured faces. The story was pretty straightforward but there's a lot of room to interpret the cylinder metaphor. I kinda wish they stopped asking me to go find 3 things sooner, though. Also, I did not know this game was procedurally generating environments for a while, and I always felt like I was doing something wrong when I found an incubator but no eggs or vice versa.