The core concept is brilliant. I wish something like The Outer Wilds actually made us piece the language together to figure out the story. Unfortunately, it ends up not used well. Decyphering the language itself is just a clunky puzzle that didn't really feel very lingustic to me at all. Figuring out the story is tangential, nearly unrelated to figuring out the language. So, wasted opportunity. More importantly, the game is a chore to play. Weird bugs (don't try to play it on an ultrawide), missing settings, easy to miss dialog that is at the same time way too slow at other times, movement is slow, space travel is slow, animations are slow… soon enough it stops feeling like a game and becomes a series of waiting for things to happen. Once the history is revealed, it's… cool, but nothing to write home about? And even then it has some holes, presumably because development ran out of time and they left one or two locations out. And finally you reach the ending, where you're presented with a terrible situation and an obvious good solution, but the good solution is not one of the choices the game offers! You can choose to commit genocide and wipe out everyone you ever knew, or keep the truth to yourself and let them slowly die out. What? It could have been so much more, and it's probably worth playing if you want a chill time and you have a lot more patience than I do. I suspect for most people, it's not worth either the price or, more importantly, the play time. It's one of the very rare cases where I don't even feel it's worth the time to watch a video playthrough, because it's going to be a slog.
