No aspect of this game lives up to it's inspirations... Bloober's signature slow-but-trippy "horror" gameplay (which I really liked in both Layers games and Blair Witch) is here but made less effective by the move to third person and loss of environmental detail that comes with that kind of change. The story just plods along, told through notes and voice over that forces you to stare at an object while the audio clip plays. Gameplay is incredibly barebones... think a 90s point and click game in 3D. I have a hard time believing Yamaoka had anything more to do with the soundtrack than letting Bloober's in-house composer use his sample library... the music here is just boring. You won't remember a single melody from this game like you do the music from Silent Hill. Voice acting is all over the place, sometimes cringe-worthy and sometimes decent enough. They waste their one big name voice actor by hiding him behind too much distortion. When it comes to the game's big gimmick, the "dual world" split-screen gameplay sounds interesting on paper. Problem is, in practice it boils down to a needlessly flashy drain on resources that adds nothing more than a visual gimmick. Expect the game to drop to half resolution whenever the screen splits. Thankfully it doesn't try to do this all that often... you'll usually be in one world or the other, for better or for worse. Puzzles are never deeper than finding an item and using it in an obvious spot. I was looking forward to this one a lot and I usually have a lot of patience for this kind of game, but in no world is this worth twice the price of Layers of Fear or Blair Witch. I'm writing this review about 4 hours in, and while I'll probably finish it (even though I've heard the ending is awful), I wish I had bought Hitman 3 instead.
