I'm not sure if I am playing this game correctly, but all of those simple little things are somehow fun: Mining stones, cooking meals, getting upgrades, cutting trees. killing slime blobs, stealing eggs from chickens and so on. The description "idle game that you will want to keep actively playing" is very fitting.
This game has very simple mechanics, but it still feels like much more than that, because the world and the general atmosphere and little stories work so well. I'd say it is scary sometimes, but not as much as you could expect from a lovecraftian game, which is a plus in my book. A big plus is, that this game is very much about progression and getting the next type of fish / ship upgrade / whatever so you can do the next mission, but it doesn't make you grind very hard. Yes, you can do some repetitive stuff if you want to or if you are too afraid to do the obvious next that is more of a challenge, but most of the time, you can do something slightly new or go to a new area and explore and you'll get everything you need that way. It respects your time instead of making you do repetitive chores, at least that's how I see it in comparison to other games with similar progression systems.
Don't play this game for its story/game mechanics, play it as a beautiful exploration toy and you'll have a good time! It's just a walking simulator with a dark atmosphere, yes. The whole thing took me about 3 hours to complete and I went slowly. The story is promising in the beginning, but doesn't expand on the interesting bits. The rest of the story feels a bit like a forced conclusion, it's not too bad, but it's really just there to mark the ending. What makes this game great is that exploring feels more interesting than in a normal game where you see what's there versus here where you discover the area around you by scanning. Scanning looks cool and is quite fun in itself. Looking back at the whole long winding cave you've scanned is really neat! Some people mentioned they didn't like to hold LMB all the time: You can just press MMB once and your scanner keeps scanning till you press MMB again. Compared to Dear Esther: DE is a more coherent game, the single parts make more sense together than in Scanner and it worked better as a whole. On the other hand, exploration in Scanner is way more satisfying.
Overall: We had fun for about two hours, but then we felt like we had seen everything, completed the goal. The setting is interesting, but I felt like there should be more to do. There is only this one type of map that you can see in the screenshots. You have to collect shiny pieces ofa teleporter and once that's done you've seen all there is. I wouldn't know why I should replay this game. For another map, that looks and plays the same? I played this game with friends and we had a little trouble setting the game up, but we got it to work. Multiplayer features are pretty basic, you can ping your friends so they see your location on their compass and you can chat. I was quite surprised to learn that the multiplayer is not really coop, but competitive. I only understood that after helping my mates to collect the teleporter pieces. The one that put the last piece in was the winner. The game was a bit of a let down, but not all bad, just very short, very little content.
