Another year, another high art indie piece that teases me with interesting puzzle mechanics, but never actually pushes them to any limit. Maybe if the story was worth my time I could forgive how offensively short and easy this game is, but the writing is frankly shallower than a petri dish. What the player sees and hears feels so half baked and unremarkable in every sense of the word. I could craft a more cohesive story stringing together bits of conversations from random people walking around my local walmart. It gave me a strong feeling like the developer had no idea how to justify the mechanic in a way that integrates to the story, but they are really trying to appeal to some cross section of people who love Portal and Outer Wilds. So they just HAD to hamfist some enviromental science psychobabble of a story in audio dialogs where characters only relay to you hints of events happening between them, while never telling you what any of those events were. The environmental story telling doesn't really carry much weight to fill in any actual details either. I'd say a solid hour of my playtime was spent making sure I listened to each log and read all the little notes spread here and there, but man, there was just no payoff. I still have no idea who these characters were or what they doing besides "Science?!"

As it stands this is a prototype for a good (in theory) puzzle game that won't be made. Even at a $25 price point, this game feels so half assed. Having a great foundational and nearly limitless concept, the designers of this game have only managed to polish their ideas into little more than gimmicks. Such a shame. So many puzzles they could just take the plunge and start raising the complexity on! Even if this boring ass story wasn't carrying me through, I could be challenged. Every time they introduced a new concept that actually took a leap to wrap myself around it would just get thrown away in the next 30 minutes to introduce another disposable mechanic. I can't recommend this buy.