Phoning Home

Everything that the developers focused on was done well: the artwork, the environment, the characters, and the emphasis on story. Unfortunately, there is not much of it. It's just a lot of wondering around to look for resources that are used to unlock minor abilities and to keep the characters going. What's bad is that they don't seem to respawn and some are rare, with one of which being quite vital. I honestly don't know if I'll be able to continue after a certain point. Fortunately, I don't think that I care to. This game is a very well made wondering around simulator.

I love the world created in this game and the novel way of telling the story. Even though I'm not very good at this type of game, I did manage to get through with ANI "only" 14% corroded (and thus not beyond repair). Although I loved the concept and story, the difficulty level is very high (quicksave is your best friend while playing) and without any mapping features finding your way can be incredibly difficult, even tedious. Particularly in the blizzard where you have even fewer clues to navigate by. The island hopping section was insane and borderline unfair. The controls can really work against you and it took me literally hours to just reach any of the 3 transmitters, getting frustrated at sliding uncontrollably down every slope that looked like it could be a path. I did persevere and finish the game, trying out both choices for the ending and while the moral dilemma was interesting and had been brilliantly worked towards from pretty much the beginning of the game, I would have liked to see just a tad more difference in the endings (particularly the after-credits scene). Despite these rather substantial complaints, I did enjoy the story and the concept so much that I'm rating it 4 stars.

Story interesting, but gameplay not. Many bugs. You can't change language in game, you must change system setting of your OS, someplace haven't resources, and you can see the emptiness, bug with mission, you complete what the need, but mission still have status not completed

With 10h, the game is on the short side but despite of its shortcomings, I found it worth playing. I'd recommend to get it on sale though. In its core, "phoning Home" an exploration based action adventure with a bit of crafting, some survival aspects plus some skill, action and puzzle elements. None of these elements is totally annoying but most of them aren't that great either. E.g. the only real enemies are orange energy clouds which appear out of the void in the most inappropriate moments. The crafting element means to collect materials to craft energy cells, fuel, repair kits and a shield for Ani. Nothing of this is really difficult or exciting. You also need to craft some things to proceed in the game which forces you to run around for resources. Then there's Ani who needs to be protected from rain and corrodes even in optimum conditions. Actually, I found this idea to be the most annoying in the game: whatever you do, Ani's corrosion increases about 1% per day (even without rain, storms etc.) and at 20% the corrosion is beyond repair. The best aspect of the game is exploration where you need to use certain abilities (thrusters, teleporter etc.) to proceed. There's nothing really alien about the world to explore though apart from two or three giant trees. Actually most of the time it looks like somewhere on earth. This includes the spaceships, settling and alien remnants. Besides, the "alien" machinery and space ships tend to be rather low poly with blurry textures. E.g. the crashed alien ship towards the end is about as visually disappointing as possible. Generally, the game and world design lacks polish. The skyscraper you need to rescue Ani from is another example as it should be totally awesome to climb a tower and fight a pterodactyl but it's just more of a crude fiddling around in an ugly plain vanilla constructions site. Last but not least, there is absolutely no language setup as the game forces the OS settings on you without any choice.