It's a throwback Lovecraftian horror point-and-click adventure, which sounds great, right? But it's mediocre by its own standards. The atmosphere is excellent, but unfortunately that's the game's only strong point. The story is at once full of holes and predictable and the gameplay is clunky and frustrating. The first issue has to do traversing the building. In order to force the story progression, you are barred from moving around freely. The rationale is so silly that it breaks whatever sense of immersion is created by the rest of the design. There are various other events that happen in the game that also make no sense. Not Lovecraftian weird, just plain ridiculous. Worse, perhaps, the silliness creeps into the puzzles. They feel so arbitrary, solvable by just backtracking and clicking on everything with every item you find. But this is tedious rather than satisyfing, because of the incredibly poor affordances offered. For example, those areas that are initially barred from you will "open" later on. But that change is very poorly indicated (there's a document you find that hints at some of it) and it's basically an annoying experience of running around and finding out what has opened up. In one case a door that was previously described as a "dead end" was suddenly open-able. Ridiculous. Likewise, you better have some patience for pixel hunting. Often the area on the screen on which you can click is extremely tiny. This completely threw me off for one puzzle, to the extent that I wasted an hour looking for an alternative solution. Giving up, I looked up a walkthrough and realized that I just didn't move my mouse over the right pixel. Yay. There are much better horror point-and-click adventures out there. Play them instead.
An atmospheric walking sim. The world and story are obviously inspired by the Bioshock games. The "horror" is implemented primarily by jump scares. If you hate those, avoid this game. Also, though beautiful, everything is rendered very darkly. That's atmospheric, sure, but it can cause eye strain. There are no in-game settings to change brightness. As a walking sim, gameplay consists of exploring the environments. There are a few simple puzzles, too, and optional collectibles, which are easy to find if you are thorough in your exploration. Unfortunately, there is also a handful of chase sequences. They are mostly frustrating due to the lackluster controls. Save points are pretty far from each other. If you intend to play in spurts, make sure to reserve some time per session so that at least you get to the next save point. All in all, it's a compelling story with decent writing and voice acting. But it's also too tedious, too long, and seemingly unfinished. I can't really recommend it, and I'm not sure I would be very interested in a sequel, even if it means closure on the story.
All aspects of the game are painless and satisfying. You'll be exploring simple but pretty levels with non-frustrating 3D platforming. The story is a fairly typical alien planet adventure, with plucky characters and ancient mysteries. Your main activity will be cleaning up gunk and collecting resources. There are also straightforward environmental puzzles, and even some combat, though it's a trivial and unnecessary addition to the game. The gunk cleaning is super satisfying. The animation is smooth and visceral, and the burst of color you get when you fully clean an area feels like your parents telling you they are proud of you. I wasn't wowed. I definitely wasn't challenged. But I enjoyed The Gunk a lot.
A very fun, and often hilarious, exploration and environmental puzzle game with combat elements. The focus is hard-to-find and hard-to-reach secrets coupled with creative and challenging environment traversal. Playing through the story is enjoyable in itself, but much of the game is about achieving that satisfying "100% completion", which provides many more hours of gameplay. There's an obvious comparison to be made to the Supraland games, which scratch the same itch. There's a "metroidvania" factor in that certain challenges can only be met after you acquire an ability. So you'll be revisiting many locations again and again, sometimes as part of the main story, and sometimes as part of the "100% completion" goal. You're going to get to know this intricate world very well. Combat is, at best, just OK. There are a few cool boss fights, but too many tedious encounters with lesser enemies, who keep regenerating and get in the way of exploration. I wish this aspect was dialed down a bit. Traversal can also be a bit frustrating due to imprecise controls and hit boxes. Combined with those pesky enemies you might find yourself dying quite a lot. On the bright side, the cost of death is acceptable. It won't take too long to get back to where you died and retrieve your lost goods. There are also several "trial" areas, which are designed as puzzles, but also require precise and fast movement. It's here that the imperfect controls can become really annoying. But with some practice, and perhaps some help from YouTube guides, they can be overcome. The story takes a back seat to the gameplay, but is told with many funny and polished live-action videos. I laughed a lot in this game. You can play as a dog! All in all it's a wonderful title for those of us who enjoy these kinds of games.
