Forget about the note, I didn't finish the game, I just stopped playing around 40% ... Why ? Well the first act was great - not perfect, but great. The ambient is balanced and pretty subtle, plus the audio makes this living nightmare really stressful, and all of that worked enough to make me forget the poorly made research sequences (the UI is minimal, which is good for immersion but makes enigmas and target finding not intuitive at all) that make you roam randomly or die three or four times in the same scripted scene just because I don't understand what I'm meant to do. The death mechanic is not mastered at all, and it's a big mistake - but I was still able not to car about it... ... and then come the second act. Where the atmosphere is even more terrific... until I realize that it focuses on what was sh**y in the first act. Poor enigmas, m**sed up QTE that you'll see coming... 2 hours of game and I die for stupid reasons, and I'm not scared at all at any moment now. Again : the game over mechanic isn't mastered at all, and it's an unforgivable mistake in an horror game.
The best of Darks Souls's successors
It's a game full of good ideas and relevant game design, but the execution is failed by lack of technique. The immersive horror should work and the gameplay is reactive enough to keep you in, but terrible optimization and poorly executed ideas (tentacle animation, bugs that clearly look artificial, and more...) always prevent proper experiment
Ths game is full of good ideas and there was clearly much work done on world building and design. Each level feels credible even though the graphical flaws (aliasing and shadows are terrible even with VSR and max settings) and the story plays simple and relevant. Unfortuntly, the rythm is jagged, animation is poor and doesn't let characters being engaging, and more globally the scenery (it's a narrative game, so yes, scenery is key) suffers questionnable choixes in execution (very bad puzzles that should just have been cut, many micro-cutscenes that weren't necessary...) Still waiting for the next installment, the project itself has much potential
