A serviceable and pleasant-enough game but short and more shallow than it seems. After a tutorial and some initial low-pressure series of puzzles the plot finally becomes more tense only to end shortly afterwards. The final screen of the game looks like a puzzle set-piece only to skip over it entirely in a cut-scene, making it seem unfinished. The ambiguous supernatural angle of the plot is also under-developed. There are frequent dialogue choices, but none of them matter; it’s rare for a choice to even cause a single sentence difference in response compared to the other options. The choice of profession in the beginning of the game only affects a single puzzle which has a different solution for each of the professions. It does not affect the character’s outlook or behavior at all and adds virtually nothing to the atmosphere or personality of the game. You may or may not find changing the character’s clothing and hair to be amusing, but it is also another shallow distraction with no real effect on the game. Milda can be made to look neat and professional or like a sloppy teenager but her behavior and the way other people react to her remain the same. Outside of a tutorial puzzle there is also no need to ever do it again, although being able to change the bland default appearance is a plus. Character interactions are strangely soft and mild with almost no antagonism even when it would make a scene funnier or increase a sense of overcoming an obstacle. The worst you encounter is a rude librarian (who will still fetch books for you) until real villains enter the game shortly before it ends. All these agreeable and helpful people make character interaction bland. There are no memorable characters and very little memorable dialogue. The game is not annoying but it is not very memorable or substantial.
All the additions and changes this DLC make are welcome and improve the game, hence my five-star rating, but I can't help but be annoyed that many of the new things have clear antecedents in 10tons previous game Crimsomland, making it hard to believe they weren't deliberately removed from the base game in order to sell desperately as DLC.
The Inner World was so charming I rushed to buy this sequel, but I was slightly disappointed. It's still a fairly good game but it doesn't hang together as well as the first. As opposed to the first game, Robert's character development occurs in only one part of the story and is a bit arbitrary; he avoids thinking about something until he can't anymore and then just gets over it; Laura doesn't develop further at all; a disappointment compared to the side-by-side development in the first game that really sold them as partners and a future couple. The villain of the first game had a fantasy-style evil plan to turn people to stone whereas the villain here simply wants to murder Robert's people. It's a strong shift in tone that the game fails to fully sell; it's ultimately as silly and cartoonish as the first game, which leaves the specter of mass murder a bizarre contrast. Despite this awkward thematic heaviness, the villain of this second game is largely a cipher compared to the straightforward villain of the first game and is also disposed of as a threat via an anticlimactic deus ex machina. Still largely enjoyable but definitely step down from its predecessor.
Very clever commentary on game design and player motivation without relying entirely on snark. Worth playing once, but that's probably it.
The art is very pretty and the voice acting is good, but I struggle to find much else to recall fondly. There are many items which are outright hidden from the player just by being hard to see on screen. There's a "highlight objects" button which remedies this problem but it's silly that this is required instead of being a shortcut as it usually is. Plenty of the puzzles have unsatisfying, barely-logical solutions and it even does a "keyhole and newspaper" puzzle completely straight as it weren't an embarrassment. The worst part is the ending, which is a big twist which should change the meaning of all the events in the whole game but really just renders them senseless. It's a pretty rank cliche to boot. I got spoiled for it and I was still cringing at it.
The documentary videos are mildly interesting but the problem is that you have to play a mediocre platformer to unlock them. If you miss one I doubt you'll be excited to re-play a level to find it. I'd rather have watched them on Youtube. Beyond just not being very interesting, the platforming can get annoying because it's a bit buggy and if you're playing in single-player mode the character you're not controlling has poor AI and will stumble into death, forcing you to replay the section. This happened to me many times. Limbo is the game that caused the recent trend of side-scrolling platformers and Never Alone compares poorly to it in every way.
Kathy Rain is a fairly short game which is pretty typical of modern indie adventure games. All the art, such as character spires and especially backgrounds, is quite good-looking. The events of the story proceed logically from one small discovery to the next which makes sense for a detective game but I found it a bit dry especially since the game is overly generous in pointing the way to the next action the player has to take. It gets close to a series of clear directions to follow rather than a puzzle to explore to find the solution. The escalation from the beginning of the game to the revelation of secrets and the climax then finale is smooth but oddly uninvolving. I found the most interesting part of the game to be chasing a red herring in the early part and realizing there was more to the story than what there first seemed to be. There are occasionally parts where Kathy can only say a single line the player chooses but as far as I can tell there are no wrong answers and little effect from the player's choice, which is a little pointless. The biggest flaw in the game is, unfortunately, the main character. Kathy is supposedly motivated by personal reasons to unravel what the player is told is a mystery (the initial hook is quite weak and only develops after a bit of playtime) but it's hard to believe it. She comes off more as mildly curious for its own sake. She is also supposedly carrying unresolved inner conflicts but these come up so infrequently and with so little force (until an avalanche with overly neat resolutions at the end) that it fails to add much color to her character. The voice acting for Kathy is never overtly bad but doesn't add much either and is one of the weaker performances in the game. She ends up seeming fairly bland, which is a serious problem for the game's heroine. The supporting cast is a little better. Some of them seems like deliberate appeals to character stereotypes (evil rich man, ignorant bumpkin, badass biker) but when Kathy and the player get to interact with them they're more complex and interesting. This is apparently aiming to be the beginning of a series and it certainly leaves enough of a hook for a sequel but I hope to see a lot of improvement in a second game if it comes.
An average-at-best horror game in terms of atmosphere (be prepared for bloody messages on walls, endless violin stings, and weird things popping out of nowhere which just stand there for a bit then disappear), although the second chapter veers into unintentional humor. As an adventure game it's trivially easy, making it feel more like a story you have to push buttons to advance than a challenge you have to figure out. The pixelated art style does a poor job of conveying visceral horror and a few gory scenes look silly because of it. It's quite short and the full price of $10 is far too high. On top of this it doesn't come close to a conclusion so you'll have to buy the "second season" as separate product to see the end which comes off to me as an artificial distinction to get a second purchase out of people, which is obnoxious.
