One of the most impressive video games I've ever played. Even on a second playthrough, when I know the map like the back of my hand, this game never ceases to astound and enthrall me.
What really makes this game so special to me is the atmosphere. The beautiful, tragic world, the detailed ambient noise and minimal amount of music, the innovative and ludicrously intricate wildlife AI, everything contributes to this being a far more "immersive" game than any of the uber-graphical games-as-movies AAA schlock people tend to put that label on. Even the gameplay, which is probably the weakest part of the game, or at least the part with the most flaws, is so involved and intricate that it puts you, the player, physically in the world unlike any other game I've played. Even things I'd ordinarily criticize like the somewhat awkward controls, the occasionally cheap difficulty, and the extremely slow pace of things can be forgiven because they make the world feel that much more real, you really feel like a feeble little mouse creature that has a hard time climbing ladders and gets eaten by giant lizards and bugs. The processes of hunting, scrounging for food, running from predators, looking for shelter, etc. are so...real. It's so hard to explain, it's a game that really has to be experienced to truly understand what makes it so great.
This game also kills it with its approach to narrative. It has a perfect balance of leaving things up to the imagination and ever so subtly dropping little lore scraps to build one of my favorite narrative worlds since Half-Life 2. The lonely, solemn, empty world feels like a character in and of itself, and by the end it's genuinely sad to watch it slowly die and rot away. And this is all without mentioning the philosophy and messaging in the game, the themes of life and death and rebirth, the blend between Buddhist/transhumanist influences and existentialist sci-fi, etc. It's a story that invokes that same bitter-sweet sadness akin to things like Everhood, Evangelion, Mother 3, JJBA Stone Ocean, etc. This game and its narrative have been hugely inspirational to my own approach to worldbuilding and story writing for my own games, and I think it's a truly standout example of interactive storytelling.
This game is not without its flaws, as some of them even I can't excuse. While the difficulty and combat are steep obstacles that can generally be overcome to the point that they don't bother me much anymore, the grinding needed to progress from region to region can be outright tedious and frustrating at times. The game's treatment of key items is abysmal, as they can be easily lost (basically requiring you to restart the day to get them back, otherwise you lose them altogether) and often waste crucial "inventory" space. The lore is frustratingly difficult to access, as it requires egregious amounts of backtracking if you don't want to just read the wiki (like I did). Like the difficulty, the controls are weird and take getting used to but are quite fun once mastered, save for the zero-gravity sections where you often just waste time floating around until you hit a wall. The game's pacing in general can be annoyingly slow once the initial magic of the atmosphere wears off, to the point that I bound a button on my controller to the dev command to speed the game up, which makes the game a lot less boring IMO. And the Rain Deer. They are awful. Truly, truly awful.
All in all, this is not a game for everyone. People will get put off by the difficulty, the slow pace, or the confusing map, and that's ok and understandable. But as for me, personally, I believe this is one of the best indie games ever made and one of the best examples of video games as an art form. Because this is a work of art. An inspirational, beautiful, flawed work of art that I friggin' love.
What really makes this game so special to me is the atmosphere. The beautiful, tragic world, the detailed ambient noise and minimal amount of music, the innovative and ludicrously intricate wildlife AI, everything contributes to this being a far more "immersive" game than any of the uber-graphical games-as-movies AAA schlock people tend to put that label on. Even the gameplay, which is probably the weakest part of the game, or at least the part with the most flaws, is so involved and intricate that it puts you, the player, physically in the world unlike any other game I've played. Even things I'd ordinarily criticize like the somewhat awkward controls, the occasionally cheap difficulty, and the extremely slow pace of things can be forgiven because they make the world feel that much more real, you really feel like a feeble little mouse creature that has a hard time climbing ladders and gets eaten by giant lizards and bugs. The processes of hunting, scrounging for food, running from predators, looking for shelter, etc. are so...real. It's so hard to explain, it's a game that really has to be experienced to truly understand what makes it so great.
This game also kills it with its approach to narrative. It has a perfect balance of leaving things up to the imagination and ever so subtly dropping little lore scraps to build one of my favorite narrative worlds since Half-Life 2. The lonely, solemn, empty world feels like a character in and of itself, and by the end it's genuinely sad to watch it slowly die and rot away. And this is all without mentioning the philosophy and messaging in the game, the themes of life and death and rebirth, the blend between Buddhist/transhumanist influences and existentialist sci-fi, etc. It's a story that invokes that same bitter-sweet sadness akin to things like Everhood, Evangelion, Mother 3, JJBA Stone Ocean, etc. This game and its narrative have been hugely inspirational to my own approach to worldbuilding and story writing for my own games, and I think it's a truly standout example of interactive storytelling.
This game is not without its flaws, as some of them even I can't excuse. While the difficulty and combat are steep obstacles that can generally be overcome to the point that they don't bother me much anymore, the grinding needed to progress from region to region can be outright tedious and frustrating at times. The game's treatment of key items is abysmal, as they can be easily lost (basically requiring you to restart the day to get them back, otherwise you lose them altogether) and often waste crucial "inventory" space. The lore is frustratingly difficult to access, as it requires egregious amounts of backtracking if you don't want to just read the wiki (like I did). Like the difficulty, the controls are weird and take getting used to but are quite fun once mastered, save for the zero-gravity sections where you often just waste time floating around until you hit a wall. The game's pacing in general can be annoyingly slow once the initial magic of the atmosphere wears off, to the point that I bound a button on my controller to the dev command to speed the game up, which makes the game a lot less boring IMO. And the Rain Deer. They are awful. Truly, truly awful.
All in all, this is not a game for everyone. People will get put off by the difficulty, the slow pace, or the confusing map, and that's ok and understandable. But as for me, personally, I believe this is one of the best indie games ever made and one of the best examples of video games as an art form. Because this is a work of art. An inspirational, beautiful, flawed work of art that I friggin' love.