Brilliant world and concept. All my intrigue goes out the window when I'm getting frustrated by movement and sluggishness. Run speed is molasses slow, .ini edits and control exploits got patched out. The patch notes say "sorry speedrunners" but all I felt was "F you, average player". Performance has classic Unreal Engine awful frametimes. If you lock the framerate with external tools, it tends to crash. You get stuck on geometry all over the place because some things aren't properly clipped. Despite having enough RAM to fit the entire game files, load times are insane even off an SSD. Slow and frequent loads are compounded by a very nice animation that loses its whimsy very quickly. The transporter devices have clunky mouse controls and don't let you buffer inputs, so every time you have to use these devices (that were designed to be in your way dozens and dozens of times), you stumble over a button not responding until the exact right frame. If you clicked too early, you might need to resposition and try again. There's a "puzzle" near the end that would be pleasant if all the controls were at your fingertips, but instead it sends you running across several areas, dealing with sloppy controls and geometry, to experiment blind, only to have to retrace steps and do it again. A puzzle where the logic would take you minutes, gets stretched into over an hour of tedium, giving you time to ponder what kind of sadist would greenlight the design. On top of all that, you can't remap the controls, which at best is annoying if you have the habit of hitting space in first-person games, and at worst is an accessibility fail. Beautiful game, very creative concept, wore out its welcome quickly. Myst fans are going to try this regardless of any review. Many technical faults could easily be overlooked if there wasn't so many player-hostile design choices. Can't recommend.
