The game gives likable impression at first glance, I saw the intro and thought "great, another adventure like Sword and Sorcery or Kentucky Road Zero". However, the first scene was an immediate bucked of cold water over your head - not an adventure game, but a stress simulator with unclear game mechanics. Basically, you command a team in a stressful, high risk scenario, but none of them can operate independently, which is accidentally exactly the very recipe to failure. You have to micromanage everything. You have to tell the hacker to hack or secure network. If you don't, he won't do squat on his own. Guard must be told to shoot. So it's like a military encounter where all your soldiers are standing still, while you run around with a little pistol, trying to win the war on your own. Of course you will fail - just as the designer of this game has failed. Two stars for the effort.
I remember playing it years ago, because it's originally a Czech game, and it's mediocre in every respect. Mundane occult plot, uninteresting characters, usual inventory chores. There are far better games out there.
The technical execution is simplistic and limited by today's standards, but the core gameplay is excellent, the atmosphere is spot-on and the parts of the game are extremely well glued together. Professional game design at its best.
The visuals are very dated, there are better looking games on phones. The atmosphere is great, marred the said visuals from time to time. The story is appropriately moody and macabre, but hey, it's Clive Barker, we all know him. The gameplay, on the other hand, is rubbish by today's standards. Inferior shooting in vast, empty corridors. What I especially like are the paintings that look differently when scrying. Three points for the ambition and for the desire to tell the story, cannot give more since it's 2013, and objectively, games are in an entirely diffetent universe today. Some games, like my favorite Dreamweb, age well. This one, not so much.
Everything is static, pre-rendered models, no animations whatsoever, artificial and forced puzzles - clockwork mechanisms everywhere, secret compartments, stupid ciphers, nothing makes much sense. The occasional characters are as alive as rubber dolls. Over the course of the game, you must heal yourself with various pills and consumables, which is really pointless, because sources like infinite fruit bowls are often present. The conclusion is absurd and unrewarding. Not recommended, unless you are desperate for clunky adventures of the "I have a house full of puzzles, wanna play?" style.
