The gameplay mechanics in terms of both animations and controls have a very gritty and immersive feel. It is very effective at placing you in the environment and making you feel like you are experiencing the story rather than observing it. The story is very engaging and makes you root for the characters... up to a point. As many have pointed out, the central plot is a bit anti-climatic, and it left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth for one of the central characters. Overall, it felt like the storywriters had written themselves into a plot that the dev team couldn't develop on time, and they had to wrap it up and cut it short. In the process, they ended up sabatoging the audience support for a character in order to justify some misguided notion about humans and our role in nature. Where I really found the game lacking was in it's graphics. The scenery and location of the story play a significant role in the plot and dialouge transcending the part of just background. Additionally, this is not an open-world game, rather the player character is limited to certain paths and playable area. These two things give a strong motivation and powerful ability to design a game that is visually stunning. Instead we got vistas comosed of cardboard cutouts painted with a limited color pallete.
I'm impressed by the idea of a game that addresses monoculture and the risks that our modern world pose for our species. However, the plot and message of the game were very 2 dimensional, and the social commentary was often contradictory (simultaneously criticizing society's response to homelessness and urban development in the same article) and poorly thought out (seemingly blaming all of the in-game society's ills on conspiratorial capitalists with little introspection). The game starts out by immersing you in a boring slow life. You waste time on a pointless smartphone game, reading text messages from work, and walking slowly throughout a grey city. But halfway through the game, you're still reading text messages from work and walking slowly throughout a grey city (I gave up the smartphone game early on). The plot fails to advance itself and the gameplay itself becomes very boring. At the beginning, the slow pace could have been an artistic choice, but by the end, it just felt like the makers ran out of ideas. This seems more like the first chapter of a game that (with a better developed plot) could have been pretty good. As it is, even with all the slow monotonous walking, I finished my first run in just under 3 hours (had to replay one section due to a bug). Overall, for a game that is priced in the upper end of the indie game range, it is very underwhelming.
