Playtime: 5 Hours
Score: 7/10

An interesting narrative horror game from The Chinese Room! So I have played a few of The Chinese Room’s games, and I have generally enjoyed them, even though most of them are just narrative focus and don’t have much gameplay mechanics. I had heard of this game through all of the Xbox showcases and when I saw it would be day one on game pass, I thought I would give it a go!

The story I thought was fairly good if a bit predictable in some places. The atmosphere is very tense and I love that they had an oil rig as the game's setting. Much of the game uses body horror to scare you, with some big influences from the film, The Thing, which I thought was cool. The gameplay is akin to something like Soma, with some basic stealth mechanics and a lot of QTE segments. I’ve come to expect this from The Chinese Room, I just wish they would expand their gameplay formula, as just walking around and clicking on things can get boring after a while. Especially since they're doing the Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines sequel, which I’m a little concerned about.

The voice acting is pretty good overall and the game looks very realistic in Unreal Engine. But I’ve always been more of an artstyle kind of guy and while good graphics are nice to have, it's not going to impress me as much, since I care more about story and gameplay. Though I will say I loved the art direction they took when it came to the monsters and how the rig will change in strange ways because of them.

As for technical performance, the game ran smoothly for me most of the time, though there were some instances where the frame rate dipped a bit. Also what I found odd was that when it came to graphical settings, there were only two options of: high or epic (basically ultra) with no medium or low settings, which I found weird. But otherwise a good experience.

Overall, it's another narrative walking sim, horror game from The Chinese Room and you're either going to love or hate it. I enjoyed it, but that's mostly because it was on game pass and I didn’t have to pay for it, which is what I would recommend most people do or wait for a sale. The game is fairly short and outside of a good narrative experience for a few hours, there’s not much beyond that.

All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/