There is so much to explore in this game, and that should be your mindset - don't rush to the end as quickly as possible, but talk to everyone, hear their stories, help your friends, heal their self-confidence. The graphics are very pretty (although I prefer my pixels to be a bit smaller than the default setting), as is the music. I think some more background ambience could help, though. Apart from that, there is nothing to complain really; I "finished" the game in about 3 hours, but there was still much more content to explore afterwards.
Lovely hand-drawn graphics, well-balanced puzzles, gradual introduction of new features, and a story that fully unloads its emotions at the end. What's there not to like? This is a great puzzle platformer, somewhat deviating from Amanita's usual style while still being familiar. I cannot stress enough how beautiful the graphics are, a screenshot doesn't do them justice. The soundtrack also has the usual Amanita quality and is well worth purchasing through the Collector's Edition. All in all, we had a lot of fun during the approximately 6-7 hours of playing this, and we especially liked finding the hidding paintings that explain some of the history of the creatures.
I very much like horror games and I prefer the horror to be of the flavor that makes me too afraid to go on rather than experiencing one jump scare after another. Amnesia was great in this regard and SOMA perfectioned it. I guess Red Barrels' flavor is just less of my type. I did enjoy both Outlast 1 and 2 with regards to their story, but I imagine they would be even better horror games if they were directed by Frictional Games. While I agree with many of the top comments, I think a one-star rating is still too harsh as I did enjoy the game to some degree, sans the jump scares and eternal retrying of passages which made them not scary at all. This game could be perfect if all the jumpscares were replaced by more atmospheric exploration parts.
Obviously this is not a full game, it's a prototype. With that in mind, it was fun trip back to the world of Thimbleweed Park, and the increasingly difficult tasks were quite a lot of fun to solve. After the first playthrough I thought the following ones would be quick, since I now knew where all the items were located. But far from that! The second one was indeed relatively simple, but starting from the third play-through, the puzzles got a fair bit more complex.
