The art direction and music are of course top notch. The game controls great, with one big caveat: getting the double jump messes up your muscle memory because pressing jump twice suddenly does something different than it did the last 20 hours. By the time I got to Mount Fay I was definitely continuing out of spite rather than because I was actually enjoying myself. The combination of tricky platforming with time limits and respwning several screens back if you fail I think is the clearest example of this game not respecting your time and turning from challenging to actively punishing. It's a shame that what started with exploring such a wonderfully crafted world ended with me deciding to beat the final boss because I just couldn't be bothered to play this anymore.
I played through this in one evening. My intial enthusiasm was fairly quickly replaced with boredom and annoyance, for several reasons. What stuck out most to me is that the writing is quite bad. Constant grammatical errors, anachronisms ("gene", "serial killer", "post-traumatic stress"), and redundancy ("the requirements that are required to enter this institution") culminate in a children's book that is barely recognizable as being written in English. It may be the case that the developers aren't native English speakers—I didn't manage to find out after a brief search—so it's possible I'm being overly harsh. But the writing quality immediately gave me a bad impression. The puzzles themselves are also fairly uninspired. You find a text saying how some masks on the wall should be arranged, you arrange them. You get a description of a chess position, you go to the chessboard and recreate it. Your reward for solving these puzzles is usually a key which you can then use to unlock a door at the other end of the mansion, behind which you will find more puzzles and more keys. The whole thing has the feel of a very elaborate escape room, which are definitely more fun if you do them in a physical space with other people. Oh, and some puzzles straight-up require trial and error. Lastly, there are some bugs, especially with the hint system. I would constantly be given hints referring to things I hadn't found yet. For example, I got the hint "According to the XXX I should look behind the painting in YYY". I had not found the XXX and consequently had no earthly ideal what that was about. You will also sometimes interact with things through walls or closed drawers. Overall I found the experience flat and uninspiring.
