The game has very impressive visuals. If you don't have a computer capable of running those visuals at full capacity, you are probably not getting your money's worth out of this game. Buy it on sale. The story is interesting, the characters are good, and the world is surprisingly complex for such a short narrative (I mean--I personally found the dialogue a bit trite by the end but I'm a harsh grader on that front). But the gameplay really hurts the experience. This is essentially a walking simulator with a shallow pretense of puzzle-solving (mostly through "crime scene reconstructions" or "deductive board" style sequences) where the game never, not through its whole run, stops holding your hand and telling you exactly what to do and when. The mechanics are just too easy and railroaded for the actual gameplay to be fun or interesting. I was originally going to cut it some slack on the basis that there's a surprising amount of exploration and reactivity, at least in the first half. Looking at different parts of the world can unlock new dialogue options, a lot of room is made for environmental storytelling, and making certain choices can have marginal impact on the story. But there are just so, SO many instances where the game takes control from you. So many cutscenes where your only input, when finally allowed, is to just walk forward while the characters monologue at you. In a game much longer and more open than this one it probably wouldn't have been that bad but my ability to actually play the game is so limited I felt like my time was being wasted. When I finally reached the ending, I discovered that I had gotten the bad one, based solely on a single dialogue choice (one that seemed kind of arbitrary at the time) that I had made about an hour ago and had long since overwritten the autosave for. I realized I had 0 desire whatsoever to replay the game for the good ending. It's not terrible. It's good for what it is, and it's short so it's not going to eat up a lot of your time. But the gameplay being so boring makes it kind of a slog to get through if you're not 100% invested in the narrative it's delivering. Even for a walking sim, it's kind of irritating when you're just trying to get from point A to point B and the protagonist is constantly stopping to have another drawn out hallucination sequence that tells us very little we haven't already gleaned from the opening cutscene.
Reviewing at halfway through. Not sure if I'll be able to get through the rest of it. Pros, game has good graphics and environmental storytelling. The progression of the horror matches well with the steady decline of your surroundings, and the puzzles are designed as such that it's easy to pick out the interactables from the scenery. There is a decent amount of tension in some areas, and the music is good at fostering an uneasy but focused atmosphere. The puzzles are unique and have some challenge for a mid-level player, but not too much that you'll be stuck for hours. Even though it's clearly a Portal clone, it does well to establish its own mechanics and identity so that it doesn't feel like you're playing a cheap knockoff. Cons, the physics are cumbersome, making the game feel like a massive chore to play and making platforming difficult. The puzzles frequently involve long sections of carefully navigating slow-moving platforms, meaning that a single poorly executed jump can waste huge amounts of time as you have to retread your steps--this is particularly frustrating because it discourages experimenting to find the solution. The mechanics of the Mag-glove are also boring. It's mostly boxes and platforms. It's just not variable enough to carry an entire game, even with the minor tweaks that Gamaji (a Studio Ghibli character in a Lovecraft horror? Really???) makes to the glove as you progress. I'd be willing to put up with the clumsy gameplay if the story was good, but both the story and characters are uninteresting and underbaked. Special mention goes to the protagonist, whose generic commentary effectively kills any enjoyment of the horror. The Lovecraft elements also feel very forced; Lovecraft's horror is best as a subtle, slow build to a final terrifying revelation. This feels more like just copy-pasting in the monsters and cults without putting in the time to build them up properly That said, I'd recommend giving it a chance if you catch it on sale.
