This game effectively no longer works on many configurations as the forums will attest to.
Great Exploration with a mediocre Narrative, Terrible, terrible, gameplay. One can largely expect to spend most their time putting the same cards into the same slots over and over again for little benefit. Or little apparent benefit at least becasue this game doesn't explain anything. Not A Thing. Which on some levels works and on every other level absolutely does not. The reason for this of course is the card mechanic in and of itself. By the mid game most of your retail space is filled with cards that refuse to properly stack, randomly throw themselves on top of other cards obscuring them and regularly spawn new cards with no graphics to tell you they've actually done so. Add the randomly appearing card slots that desperately try to make themselves space only to dissapear again a few moments later and you've got a real sense of interface screw going on. Screw so bad that the lack of explanation is overriden by the inability to reliably locate anything important on the scren. The worst practical application of this is the game over effects. You'll regularly end up in the midst of a multi hour game, notice a despair event has spawned without your noticing and has already grabbed 2/3 of the cards it needs for your game over. Which would be fine if the game hadn't seemingly randomly scattered those cards around the board making it impossible to notice them amidst the constant spawning and despawning of cards going on practically all the time. Even then the number required to lose remains pitifully low when the game is hours and hours long and your amount of cards only increases. Game overs feel woefully undeserved when the game sneaks them up on you and you just can't see them coming if you want to play the game at a rate that isn't tedious. It feels like you're being punished for not stopping every 5 seconds to reorganise your cards the game just scattered everywhere. This is made even worse becasue the game won't let you cancel actions amd you can only have 1 instance going on at any one time. One of the only ways to reliably offset those random gameovers relies on the exploration slot being free, but one of the exploration options is a long, often poorly explained expedition mechanic that you can only stop by running at the problem until your money for it runs out. It's just as bad for the other slots, especially talk which is pretty much the worst method of assigning npcs to quests I've ever seen. The whole thing is clunky and make experimentation feel like a real chore. Worst of all. This game is grindy, beyond all belief. It takes hours to play but isn't fundamentally complicated. The main mechanic of the game comes down to grind certain items until you get matching pairs and a good amount of a resource to use on them. Everything else is just bolted onto the side and often doesn't add a level of complexity to the game just a bit more manual rote labour you have to do to achieve your goals. All (realistically) to pad the game out and hide the fact there's just not a lot of compelling content here. The game design is very similar to Press Button Get Dopamine type mobile games that rely on mechanics that are psychologically addicting instead of actually fun to hook you to the experience. It's pretty clear as to why the devs chose that style. The gameplay doesn't support the positive parts of the game and it really shows.
Great Exploration with a mediocre Narrative, Terrible, terrible, gameplay. One can largely expect to spend most their time putting the same cards into the same slots over and over again for little benefit. Or little apparent benefit at least becasue this game doesn't explain anything. Not A Thing. Which on some levels works and on every other level absolutely does not. The reason for this of course is the card mechanic in and of itself. By the mid game most of your retail space is filled with cards that refuse to properly stack, randomly throw themselves on top of other cards obscuring them and regularly spawn new cards with no graphics to tell you they've actually done so. Add the randomly appearing card slots that desperately try to make themselves space only to dissapear again a few moments later and you've got a real sense of interface screw going on. Screw so bad that the lack of explanation is overriden by the inability to reliably locate anything important on the scren. The worst practical application of this is the game over effects. You'll regularly end up in the midst of a multi hour game, notice a despair event has spawned without your noticing and has already grabbed 2/3 of the cards it needs for your game over. Which would be fine if the game hadn't seemingly randomly scattered those cards around the board making it impossible to notice them amidst the constant spawning and despawning of cards going on practically all the time. Even then the number required to lose remains pitifully low when the game is hours and hours long and your amount of cards only increases. Game overs feel woefully undeserved when the game sneaks them up on you and you just can't see them coming if you want to play the game at a rate that isn't tedious. It feels like you're being punished for not stopping every 5 seconds to reorganise your cards the game just scattered everywhere. This is made even worse becasue the game won't let you cancel actions amd you can only have 1 instance going on at any one time. One of the only ways to reliably offset those random gameovers relies on the exploration slot being free, but one of the exploration options is a long, often poorly explained expedition mechanic that you can only stop by running at the problem until your money for it runs out. It's just as bad for the other slots, especially talk which is pretty much the worst method of assigning npcs to quests I've ever seen. The whole thing is clunky and make experimentation feel like a real chore. Worst of all. This game is grindy, beyond all belief. It takes hours to play but isn't fundamentally complicated. The main mechanic of the game comes down to grind certain items until you get matching pairs and a good amount of a resource to use on them. Everything else is just bolted onto the side and often doesn't add a level of complexity to the game just a bit more manual rote labour you have to do to achieve your goals. All (realistically) to pad the game out and hide the fact there's just not a lot of compelling content here. The game design is very similar to Press Button Get Dopamine type mobile games that rely on mechanics that are psychologically addicting instead of actually fun to hook you to the experience. It's pretty clear as to why the devs chose that style. The gameplay doesn't support the positive parts of the game and it really shows.
Didn't read the reviews cause I was hyped for this. As others have noted, there's no steam crossplay yet with gog which means there's a pitifully small amount of players on this version of the multiplayer.
Keep in mind this game is free, but being free doesn't warn it freedom from critique. Mechanics wise this game is the same as its paid for parent, Stasis there isn't much else to say if you want reviews on the game-play it's best to go look at the reviews for that game instead. Some of the puzzles are fairly illogical in this game from early on but they do get better. However the movement mechanics and inventory management remains clunky and awkward. On the bug front there's a few but none game breaking. Loading times can be strangely long for certain areas which tends to break the flow of the game considering it's a short story driven adventure. There really isn't an excuse for keeping the player waiting especially when the game relies on you backtracking a fair amount. Worse is the poorly defined hitboxes for area transitions and item interaction coupled with a character wholly unwilling to path-find ever. Storywise, look elsewhere. The game has only a very minimal story and does no work to earn its ending. It wants to feel dark and deep but it just comes across as pointless. Despite the characters struggles any growth is rendered moot by the ending leaving you with a feeling that you just wasted an hour of your life. Take this game for what it is, a demo for stasis(despite it technically being a sequel). If you think you might like Stasis play this game then decide if you want to buy stasis, if you enjoyed stasis and really wanted more game there's a little more here. Anyone else might want to find something better to do with their time, even for free.
