styggron: My goodness more reviews are up and boy do people hammer this title. I was just about to add it to my cart but not now. Maybe wait until it is much cheaper.
:(
Well, you seem to have your mind made up already, so maybe there's no point in me presenting a different opinion on this game, but here it goes, all the same:
I actively avoid watching/reading reviews of games I'm interested in, maybe that's a bad thing, I don't know, I have no clue as to what people have been criticizing so much about Californium. To me, it's a nice enough game with zany graphics/art direction, that runs smoothly on low-spec machines and has a decent enough story/character development. Maybe I'm somewhat biased, being a Literature major myself, but I really enjoyed watching the world through the perspective of a writer (an *actual* writer, not a journalist or a chemist that writes books, or whatever, which are usually the writer tropes in video games -- in Californium you get to play as a *writer*, one inspired by Philip K. Dick himself, and there's an overall 50s-80s US writer feel throughout the game; it's very "Pynchon-esque", not to mention the obvious Hunter S. Thompson vibe you get from the game, all around).
The game is a "walking simulator" with minor puzzle elements, people generally don't favour experimental narrative kind of games, I'm guessing that's part of the reason it's being reviewed so badly. If this is not your kind of game, there's nothing wrong with that, and, yes, in that case, you're better off just skipping it altogether. If, on the other hand, you do enjoy those types of games, I'd highly recommend you to at least wishlist it and try it out whenever it gets a price drop and you don't have to invest that much money to get it.
