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In this expansion you start without snow, and actually collecting coal is useless. It's autumn, and you're assigned to build a generator. You have a timeline and need to complete stages of the generator on time, otherwise... you can guess what happens. In the meantime, it starts snowing... It's a fresh look at the same game, the city is still circular, but now the centre is a huge construction site. New buildings, resources and technology. And new problems, as this time it's not cold that bites you most. This time the workers are there for the money, so if they don't like the environment, they're going to strike, and you need to improve the conditions, or face the delays. And one more thing: do you prefer the workers or the engineers?... Interesting and demanding. And irritating, especially when you have a tight timeline, and your workers begin a strike... Definitely worth playing!
Wow. The game is just an experience out of this world. Not "just some fantasy world", but the very real world inside someone's head. And made into a very good game, too. The story is interesting and well told. The graphics are excellent, beautiful and terrifying. The puzzle parts are just of the right type not to break the immersion. The fight system is rather simple, but meaningful and interesting, even though the enemies are maybe a little bit too repetitive. The acting, together with the face motion capture, was so realistic that it was sometimes easy to forget it's a game and not a movie, or reality... And after finishing the game, I recommend watching the movie about how much work was put into the game, I mean especially work with mental health specialists and patients - this makes many aspects of the game even more meaningful. It's very impressive how much effort was put in the project, especially given the difficult topic it talks about. Honestly, this game is one of the most impressive I've played in a long time.
The mood in the game is nice, the basic mechanics is also fine, but there are many absurds that I noticed in a couple of hours of playing (I didn't finish the game), like when a person gets cold (I mean the disease) they are only cured with a medical kit, or at least I didn't find anything else that would "fix" this. If you have none, very sad, but your character dies of cold. Wow. Actually they first drop as dead, but if you have adrenaline, you can revive them with some life left, but they still have cold, so they're going to drop again. So adrenaline is needed to keep them alive. Guys, that's not how cold works, looks pretty absurd. There are some more, but probably the biggest failure is that the anomalies, the monsters, well, they are annoying, but not really terrifying or anything, they don't eat people alive or whatever. One of them really doesn't do any harm as it's afraid of light and characters always have flashlights with them. On the other hand, the electric ones are takin away life from the characters, and I had some kind of trap for them, but couldn't find a way to activate it... Thankfully running away was usually enough. Somehow encounters with the anomapies are not very satisfying, at least in the first few levels.
I think this might be the most interesting programming game I've played. The programming language is interesting, challenging and often even frustrating, but for a programmer playing a programming game that's exactly what you might expect. Due to randomness (e.g. it's random which of the EXAs receives a transmission if multiple are listening), often best solutions are heuristic, and it seems impossible to invent an exact solution. Which means it's even more satisfying to find a better solution than the previous one. As opposed to TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, the amount of code that a single processor can contain is unlimited, and it's even possible to add comments in code. It's just that if you have too much code in total, you will not show up on the histograms, but the task can still be solved - which is great news, especially for beginners. Most of the tasks are easy to solve, but difficult to improve to the level better than the 10th percentile, let alone top percentile. And the extra campaign - well, this one is harder, I haven't finished it yet. The story told by the game is, well, not bad, and I liked looking up information in the zines - it really has the '90 feeling to it. It's maybe too easy, usually you are told which article to read for information about a particular task, it would be maybe better not to state this so clearly, but rather let the player have the "I think I've read about this somewhere... aha! here it is" moment.