The game is fun and the story is intriguing, but it's definitely one of those games where you're just playing it because you want to do the entire series. It's fun but the gameplay is very, very basic. For the most part it boils down to climbing a tower to see part of the map, do an investigation, and then do the assassination. Once you do enough assassinations then you complete a memory sequence, which then continues part of the modern story, and then you continue. I honestly did not enjoy the investigations that much. Your options were basically "follow a guy into an alley and punch him a few times", "kill a few guards on the roof", "make it to this area of the map within a certain amount of time", and "follow a guy until he's close to other people and pickpocket him". Now what I did enjoy a lot about this game was the stealth. There weren't too many actual mechanics, but it was designed in way where you really had to mentally plan ahead on how you were going to get in, take out your target, and get out as quickly as possible. And then if you failed and got caught you'd have the entire city on you. The combat was fairly simple, but the sheer amount of guards you'd have to face made it so that you wouldn't want to get caught because running around the city would eventually overwhelm you. And then once that happens, really the only way to hide is to get on the roof. Unlike Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood (and probably the rest of the games), you can't just kill your target and then quickly make your way to another section of the city and be completely fine. If you happen to fall off a building into the city then you'd immediately have guards running at you no matter what part of the city you were in. The way it was executed just made it really tense if you got caught and relieving once you managed to hide.
Some concerns I initially had was that the entire game would be split-screen where both worlds are rendered at the same time. The main concern was that it would be hard to look at, performance would tank, and it would make running from the monster unnecessarily difficult. However, most of the time you're either in one world or the other and the only times both are rendered at once is for some puzzle sections where there's no monster. The dual world level design is actually really well designed and it definitely feels like you have to interact with both worlds to solve puzzles. The story is actually really unnerving at times where it made me feel unsettled even when there wasn't a monster, which not many games have done for me. Although keep in mind it does cover themes of abuse so it might be triggering. I was actually surprised at how well optimized this game is. I was playing this on a GTX 1060 3GB and to be honest I was worried that I bought a game that my PC couldn't run. For the most part I was able to run the game very smoothly at 1440p with medium to high graphics, which was a lot higher than I thought I could run it at. The performance definitely did tank at times during the split-screen segments but it wasn't that bad since the split-screen parts were just puzzles. What also surprised me was that there was one chase segment in the gameplay where the world kept switching every few seconds and I didn't run into any framerate issues and only some very mild texture popping. So if you have a better graphics card than what I have then performance probably isn't going to be an issue. Overall this game had a great story, great dual world mechanic, and ran much better than I thought it would with the specs I was using. It's not the best, but I enjoyed it a lot and would definitely recommend it!
The game has an interesting story and very cool other-worldy atmosphere to it. The first half of the game has you teleporting from your room to the main level through a hole in your wall, with the only way to heal being going back into your room. The second half it gets switched up where "hauntings" can happen in your room that you need to purify, and you now have to rely on healing items because your room no longer heals you. However, aside from this interesting twist, the game really drags out in the second half. It starts off what looks like to be a rescue mission in a new level, but then you essentially have to go through all the locations you went to in the first half and it just felt like a way to give the game a longer playthrough without adding much substance. Fortunately, it does pick up again the climax. Some other things worth noting is that the combat is really clunky, which is apparently supposed to add to the tension but it just feels like bad combat. The "sword of obedience" which is supposed to pin down ghosts never worked for me except for the one level where you're required to pin a certain ghost. But other than that, the feature seems to be broken. As far as horror goes, it's not scary aside from a few story moments, but the atmosphere is pretty cool. Overall I'd say it's ok. It's got a cool theme and interesting story, but if it didn't drag out in the 2nd half I would've probably given it 4 stars. The combat and mechanics feel outdated (not in a good way) but this is an older game so I won't count it against it, but it's something you should be aware of.
