Before the game comes out I played the demo couple of times and I keep loosing quickly.
Will the whole game bis that hard and unforiving? Do you have any tips?

From my handful of attempts, there is a degree of randomness that does affect your decision making. What I've learned so far in the demo:

- You need to keep the fire going. If you sleep one night without any fire you freeze to death. I don't know if the size of the fire has any influence on your crews' mental health

- Talk to the droid every day to see how your crew are doing. The dog and the droid do not have problems with their mental health. The droid lists four numbers corresponding to the soldier, doctor, psychiatrist and engineer in that order.

- Talking to a crew member increases their mental well being. You can tell when they are in a bad way by how they are animated.

- Pay attention to crew members who are not moving at all. They have the virus and will die after 3 days of not being cured. I think you can use this to your advantage as their mental health does not change while they are incapacitated. In some playthroughs my crew were constantly attacked by the virus, in one they never got infected at all.

- The soldier is your best method of procuring food, though this uses up ammunition. At some point you will be attacked by animals and he needs ammunition to defend the camp. If he runs out of ammo you can kill the droid for a large cache of ammunition, though I found that playing the game without the droid's analysis of the crew mental health was difficult

- The dog is not very useful. It can hunt but there is a great chance you are just wasting an action on nothing. When it dies the rest of the crew is supposed to suffer some morale issues. I haven't tested if this means they take a negative hit to their mental state or if their mental state fails faster. Killing the dog seems to be a good way of saving food rations.

- The only use I have found for the doctor is creating antidotes for the virus. Maybe there is an event later in the scenario that requires his expertise, but from what I have seen he is quite expendable if you need to save on food for example.

- I think killing the soldier improves the mental health of the engineer, but I haven't looked into exactly in what way.

- Losing either the psychiatrist or the engineer usually means the other one runs off within a couple of days as they are married. Great going there, whoever assembled this covert ops team...

- I am not sure that spending five actions on group therapy is worth it most of the time. Spending four to talk to each crew member seems more efficient, as it leaves you one point for something crucial like keeping the fire going, hunting or repairing the radio. It also means you can talk twice to a single crew member, though I don't know if this has any effect over just talking once.

With all this in mind, the resources you need to pay attention to on a day by day basis are the crew mental health and possible infections. On a longer term perspective you need to balance keeping the fire alive, stock food and putting in some repairs on the radio. These can be planned for as they are more predictable. Think two or three days into the future about these things so that you do not need to do everything in one day. I've seen infections hitting two people in the same day, and often two or three days in a row, but then again, other playthroughs they hardly happened at all. With so many things going on under the hood I think deciding how much medicine to stock is the one resource you should consider last as they will either not be necessary or you get hit with so many infections you do not have time to do the other vital stuff.

All that said, I have not beat the demo scenario. Maybe my analysis is dead wrong on some points.

I don't know. I'm still doing something wrong. If I try to keep the people in good mental condition I can't repair the radio and most of the times I can't hunt for food.

Same here - I've also been checking out the demo to see if it's worth getting the full game.

While the difficulty doesn't bother me - I've played about a dozen times and haven't come close to winning yet - at this point I'm not sure it's as deep as it first appears.

I don't mind the randomness, as that's what makes games like this interesting. That is, if lots of bad things happen in a row, you have some tough choices to make so you can keep going - that's harsh, that's frustrating - but I LIKE that kind of challenge.

What isn't so good is that while the "mental state" thing is kind of a cool concept, it takes MUCH more focus than the other stuff, such as finding food for example. While I can understand deaths affecting people, and there being tensions that may boil over, and definitely running out of food wouldn't be good for morale (in addition to the whole starvation thing), you'd think that a "professional" team like this - especially with a shrink among them - would be able to hold it together for more than a few weeks without rocking back and forth in the fetal position, or running away in the middle of the night.

On top of that, I was expecting the mental side to manifest itself a bit more directly on an inter-relational level. Like for example, the engineer and the soldier getting into a fight over some trivial matter, and you having to take measures to reduce the tension so one doesn't kill the other. Or perhaps having a rationing system - less food each so it lasts longer, but morale drops quicker, and/or someone with low morale may sneak into the food at night and take more than their share. Or someone loses it and drinks all the vaccine (!??) or something.

When it comes down to it though, my impressions of the demo would agree with other reviews I've seen - that this game (if the rest of the game is similar) is mainly a resource management game, with randomised results for certain actions (such as hunting).

This wouldn't be so bad if it made a bit more sense - people freaking out when your food stockpile is fine and no one has died yet is a bit stupid. Having a limit on the actions per turn seems jarringly artificial as well - deciding between having a chat to someone and ordering someone to hunt for food just doesn't make sense. It would have made more sense if you had a set amount of time per day (irrespective of number of people), and each person could be ordered to do something, and each "thing" takes a certain amount of time. Also the "chats" you have with the people repeat far too often - not sure if this is improved in the full game - and they don't say much to begin with, so the whole idea of "chatting" to stop them freaking out seems even more artificial than it already is.

I have to admit, despite its faults, the demo was kind of addictive - so I'm not going to immediately believe all those "it's too random" or "there's only one way to win" reviews, since there are people who say the same thing about roguelikes (e.g. FTL). So I'd like to hear some opinions from fellow GOG'ers who get this and see their impressions.

I think the snowy setting for the demo looks like an exceptionally hard place to sleep. About a week of extreme sleep deprivation would make most people confused and desperate enough to wander off into the night looking for a warm place to sleep or just anywhere that isn't living hell. On top of that you would be eating alien wildlife, dog meat and potentially the flesh of your team mates the whole time.

It is a brutal scenario and I think mental health is rightly portrayed as the most important resource.

I still haven't played the full game and am excited to do so.

At first I really liked "demo" and was exited to know there would be full game.
REALLY ENJOING playing this one!

Full game has "easy" difficulty setting. In this mode things is much easier than in "demo". "Campfire" episode is also got more interesting.
Hovewer, "original" difficulty in full game is really tough.

I managed to finish original "demo" with all team, it took about 2-3 hours from first run... But it took some luck:
We ran out of bullets on day 10 or so. Single wild animal attack could end everything, but I could destroy robot to get bullets.

Some points from my strategy for original "demo":
- Fire size does not affect morale.
- Plan ahead: successful group therapy for 4 members need at least 8 food and fire for 2 days.
Plan group therapy after animals attack.
- It starts really difficult to control situation when something go terribly wrong (for example 2 people dead in one day), so try to keep everthing good as long as you can.
- Keep morale levels at 4-5. Don't trust animations for morale levels, ask robot (it costs nothing).
- Group therapy is very effective. Use it when everyone's morale is low. If problem only with one member - talk to him.
- Stunned by medusa team member cost -1 action point per day (it's also a good "medusa" indicator). Inject vaccine immediately.
- Hunger drops morale very fast. Even in critical situations try to keep at least 4 food for 5 members.
- You need about 10-12 bullets reserve to defend from animals, use other to get food.
- Repair radio on spare points.

You are not bad, the game is just bad. The idea of running around micromanaging everyone is ridiculous. The hostage reactions are just not realistic. If you shoot someone for running away, the next one should think twice, but not in this game.

Plus, the trial/error design is extremely tedious and just not fun to play.

I consider this game an equivalent of literary snobism. A literary snob just writes intentionally cryptic book with hidden references known only to select few, and then criticizes people for not "getting it". But a bad is book is just a bad book - inaccessibility and convoluted plot is no excuse (nor substitute) for bad narration. The same applies to this game and its design.

It resembles a puzzle, but in reality, it does not qualify as a puzzle. It's like a black box with a hidden maze inside containing a little steel ball. The only thing you can do is to shake the box long enough to be lucky to shake the ball out. The complexity of the maze is irrelevant, because it's hidden to you.

I agree with this statement. It feels like a pretintious art project disguised as a game. Yes, games are supposed to challenge you. But they are also meant to be FUN! Which this game is not. I just have no will continue playing this thing.

This game looked interresting based on the trailers and game description. But I really feel duped, since it gives you the impression, that it was a click-and-point adventure game... Last time I pre-order just to save a lousy buck!

P.S. Try reading the user reviews on Steam. It just backs up what has been said here...

This is why I haven't made it past the very first section. The hostages would be fine if they don't run and don't try anything, but I can't let one get away from me alive. That would show the others that my team isn't serious and all the other hostages could just walk away also. It's necessary to kill one of them if they try anything to keep the others in line; but it doesn't work.

Actually a better option would be to shoot the one running in the leg, injure them so they can't get away without killing anyone, and you still show the other hostages what will happen to them if they try anything. Or better yet, an option to just knock them all out, problem solved.

They seem to get up and run randomly, which causes a cascade of me having to kill 2-4 of them. I don't have time to calm them down as I need my guard to shoot back the riot police and hack the system, which just makes them panic more. If I take time to calm them, the riot police advance too quickly and I make no progress on the hack, the whole thing is just annoying, not fun.

The game isn't what I was expecting when I bought it

That scenario definitely sounds annoying - and wrong. I would have DEFINITELY thought that shooting a hostage would make the others more compliant, not less compliant - especially if they're shot while trying to escape.

I would have thought you wouldn't need to calm them down as much as scare the living crap out of them so they're too scared to move. Fear is, IRL, a very big motivator. Logically, if they perceive the consequences of running to be greater than the consequences of sitting tight, they should be less likely to run.

The more I read of impressions/reviews of this game though, the more I'm convinced that this game has its own idea of "logic".