I've been waiting for this to show up on GOG for years just so I could finally buy it officiall. I don't know how to describe aside from saying it's like a dungeon crawling, 1st person survival horror, but that doesn't feel like I'm doing it justice. I just get engrossed everytime I play this game. From the atmosphere, the interface, the unique puzzles and items and the slowly unraveling mystery: I can't say enough good things about this game. The only downside is it leaves me wanting more games like it, but I think too much time has passed to recapture the magic from this game's era. If any of that piques your interest, you're not likely to be disappointed.
To start, I can't speak for the PC controls since I opted for the Switch version, but my review focuses more on the general gameplay than anything else. The game is competent enough, but it feels rushed. It sets the bar pretty high to start with. There's a very high level of detail found in the pixel art. The animated cutscenes are great. It does a great job setting up the atmosphere and gets you excited to dive in, but it just feels so lackluster after a while. It's the small things that just accumulate over time. You'll gradually notice that the attention to detail put into the art didn't quite transfer over to a lot of the level designs. You'll notice that the variety of enemies isn't as varied as you'd have hoped, seeing certain ones used over again in other areas where they just don't thematically fit in. You'll discover that, yeah, if you read the tips, that floating jump attack is kinda nice, but it'd sure be nifty if you could slash downward when certain mobs make a habit of hovering below your reach. You'll collect a number of rosary knots, wonder what to do with them and wonder why the NPC you need to interact with to make them functional wasn't somewhere you could find them earlier considering you've already found five or six bike vessels by this point. You'll be near the end of the game, finishing up a side quest where you're rewarded with the ability to run through mud and wonder why did they wait so long to give me this skill and why do I have to constantly juggle relics when they just seem like they perform functions that should just stay on at all times after you acquire them. You'll even wonder why they opted to do what they did with the map where sections go dark unless you highlight them with your cursor, you can't zoom in and you just wish you could drop some pins on important areas. That's my review basically: lot of small gripes for a game I was expecting to be an overly polished masterpiece. 2 instead of 3 because I'm bitter.
I really pains me to give this a one-star review, but when a game is this broken, what other choice do I have? To be fair, the game itself and what it has to offer is very nice. I really enjoy the atmosphere, scavenging for items, wondering if I'm going to be able to survive the next encounter with the equipment I've got and just the overall feel of everything. I actually really love this game. That said, it's got some bugs, and from what I've looked up, there's no sign of them being fixed at all. The disappearing items bug that happens sometimes when you try to move items into your campsite is just a little annoying, but it's not like the item itself just completely vanishes. Rather, the picture of the item is just not there. If you point the mouse over the space it's supposed to occupy, you'l see the item description pop-up and you can easily move it somewhere else where this problem won't happen. I imagine this bug would be more annoying the smaller the item is though. Tried looking up a way to fix it or see if it was being addressed, but it looked like the programmer couldn't figure out how to resolve the issue. The threads I found were fairly old, but I assume nothing changed in that time if I'm still coming across that bug after buying the game in late-September 2016. However, that's trivial compared to why I gave this one-star. My saves just randomly get corrupted. I can save and quit and it'll be fine most of the time, but then every so often I'll do that, go to load it later and it just hangs for eternity. That's broken beyond acceptable. I don't have a problem with the permadeath mechanic and constantly restarting when it's my own fault, and I even forgave the game for doing it the first time, but for it to happen again within the span of two weeks? I'm sorry, but that makes this thing unplayable for me, and if it's unplayable, I can't realistically see how this should be rated higher. Fix the bugs and you'll have a niche masterpiece.
