Spectacularly designed puzzles oriented around shifting perspectives and excellent environmental humor make this game work well and all coalesce into a final message that works, and I left the game inspired, ready to handle new challenges to come. This alone makes the game worth playing.
I'm going to be much, much harsher in my review than the game deserves, and that's almost entirely a function of how close this game gets to perfect execution of its own concept. The overarching narrative and the conclusion all fit the core mechanics in a way that works and deserves to be experienced fresh. You should play it.
With that said, the core theme and excellent puzzles are undermined by a couple of things. First, the game has horror undertones, but doesn't really understand horror. So much of the game's conceit is that you've become trapped in your own dreams and are trying to escape the recesses of your own subconscious and of the world created by the therapist's clinic that ostensibly helps you navigate it, and the game even teases the idea of forcing you to confront your own demons and psychological issues at some point in the first act. It never happens, and the horror ends up being limited to creepy back alleyways, dark hallways, and fake bloody handprints, making the midsection aesthetically creepy without purpose. It makes the horror both seem toothless and incredibly threatening; I spent a lot of time worried that the game was going to throw jump scares at me just because "it'd be spoooky oooooo," which it fortunately never did.
Second, the game features two voiceover characters, one attempting to mimic the narrator of The Stanley Parable, the other attempting to mimic Portal's GLaDOS. Neither narrator lands with the wit of their inspirations, and Pierce's repeated and obnoxious reintroduction of his own name is not made more amusing by the AI character mocking him for it. I found it irritating, purposeless, and without narrative justification. It wasn't even close to enough to make me stop playing, but it really gave me the impression that the designers felt like it worked in other indie/puzzle games without really understanding how or why.
I'm going to be much, much harsher in my review than the game deserves, and that's almost entirely a function of how close this game gets to perfect execution of its own concept. The overarching narrative and the conclusion all fit the core mechanics in a way that works and deserves to be experienced fresh. You should play it.
With that said, the core theme and excellent puzzles are undermined by a couple of things. First, the game has horror undertones, but doesn't really understand horror. So much of the game's conceit is that you've become trapped in your own dreams and are trying to escape the recesses of your own subconscious and of the world created by the therapist's clinic that ostensibly helps you navigate it, and the game even teases the idea of forcing you to confront your own demons and psychological issues at some point in the first act. It never happens, and the horror ends up being limited to creepy back alleyways, dark hallways, and fake bloody handprints, making the midsection aesthetically creepy without purpose. It makes the horror both seem toothless and incredibly threatening; I spent a lot of time worried that the game was going to throw jump scares at me just because "it'd be spoooky oooooo," which it fortunately never did.
Second, the game features two voiceover characters, one attempting to mimic the narrator of The Stanley Parable, the other attempting to mimic Portal's GLaDOS. Neither narrator lands with the wit of their inspirations, and Pierce's repeated and obnoxious reintroduction of his own name is not made more amusing by the AI character mocking him for it. I found it irritating, purposeless, and without narrative justification. It wasn't even close to enough to make me stop playing, but it really gave me the impression that the designers felt like it worked in other indie/puzzle games without really understanding how or why.