Got this as a freebie so my complaining rights are limited. It's also almost 25 years old so it wasn't designed for today's much better hardware and finer grained screens. The navigation, which is important at various crucial parts of the game, is very frustrating. Frequently you'll find your character going in the opposite direction from which you intended because you moved beyond some sort of boundary. Sometimes it seems impossible to get from point A to point B until you finally do the same thing you've been trying over and over only this time it works. There are puzzles that depend on precise navigation. They are real vocabulary building exercises. Oh, puzzles. All point and click games have problems to solve that are called puzzles. In this game there are problems that have no logic at all to them. The only way to solve them without a walk through is by systematically trying everything possible. Some of the puzzles do have clues. Some have none at all. Consider a machine with a wheel control that can be moved counterclockwise or clockwise. Imagine that for no particular reason you must move the wheel in only one direction even though you can arrive at the "correct" settings from either direction. I know, like a wheel type combination lock. The good part is the insane story line. The how come for the story is a spoiler. At various times your character may be a man with a heavily bandaged head, a little girl, a four armed cyclops, or an Aztec god. The story takes place in a hospital, an Aztec village, a small American town, a circus on an island, and other seemingly unrelated locales. Each section has an internal logic of sorts. Some of the dialogue is clever although the voice acting is not terribly good compared to modern big budget games. I finished the game with the aid of a walk through. I swore at the puzzles and character navigation problems. The story made me want to finish in spite of the mechanics.
Overall the game is fun to play but it has some mechanical problems. In certain segments early in the game the frame rate drops to under 5 fps. The extreme slo-mo is annoying. In the Scarecrow segments and the Joker boss fight the keyboard controls for movement don't work as they do in the rest of the game. The mouse doesn't change the camera angle and movement is limited to N, S, E, W, more like a platform game. That means that you can't run in a circle or move diagonally . I had to switch to a controller for the Joker battle since the controller allows the analogue movement the rest of the game supports. In the Scarecrow segments you never know for sure how the screen is oriented. You have to die several times in order to learn which way the keys move.
At the most basic level this game is a linear fps. If it were only that it would be boring. I'm not interested in tactics and weapons. My goal in games with combat is to find the combination of gear and tactics that gives me the biggest bang for the smallest amount of in game thought. This could be called algorithmic thinking. Do it in the fewest lines of machine code with the smallest amount of overhead. This game has an enjoyable story with some pretty good voice acting. The City in the Sky has a steampunk theocracy theme that's fun and interesting. I'm glad that there's an element of mystery and a goal apart from killing everything that gets in your way. The only negative for me was the sky lines. In many cases it was not clear how to get from point A to point B by using them. I resorted to random landings a lot. The in game schematic (wall poster) maps were no help whatsoever. I played on easy difficulty and was able to finish the game without dying a whole lot. A lot of times you can't complete a section without dying a few times but I think of that as research. I enjoyed the ending. It's the ancient science fiction multiple universe trope but it works well in a shooter game because of the amount of effort you have to expend to get there. It's an animated version of the '60s art movies with a lot more splatter and less verbal gymnastics. Most similar game among those I've played is Nier Automata. It's different but it makes you question stuff and has it's own atmosphere.
This game is a good idea that isn't implemented terribly well. The artwork and voiceovers are very good. It does have the atmosphere of mental illness but it's used to create tension in the game rather than drive the main character. Oddly, the voices in Senua's head offer practical advice in combat situations. Combat is problematic. The random number generator plays a big role and the controls, PC version, are unpredictable. There is no guarantee you'll be able to move or complete an action every time under identical conditions. The character experiences random paralysis in combat. The where's Waldo/hidden pictures component of the game is tedious. I have a limited tolerance for find the object and superimpose a mask over it. It says something about me that I finished the game. I'm not sure exactly what that is but I felt like if I didn't complete it I'd somehow be giving in to the writers' intentions.
The good parts are the story and the art work. It looks like Europe in the late Middle Ages with a little license in Amicia's clothing. The voice acting is good. Hugo and Amicia seem plausible as brother and sister. The not so good part is the mechanics. On an I7 8 core 2.9GHz desktop, 16 GB RAM with a Radeon RX 550 graphics card and 4 GB of RAM the game was sluggish. It was impossible to adjust the mouse sensitivity to a low enough level without taking the resolution down to 720P and adjusting the "camera" settings to their lowest possible levels. Even then mouse response was problematic. Since the combat requires precise positioning of your character, the controls make the random number generator a big factor in the game. Another thing I thought could have been improved was the total lack of visibility in most of the areas where you have to sneak through and/or have combat. This meant that the only way to plan a route was by dying multiple times till you discovered all of the surprises. Also, when NPCs ambush you they always appear facing you regardless of the direction from which they come. It requires a, pun intended, brute force approach to strategy. The puzzles that involved positioning things suffered from the same visibility problem. It's like playing basketball or soccer with hood on. My real frustration came from the final boss battle. I ended up solving it by watching a couple of videos and making a list of cues from the boss's dialogue. Even after making a complete set of notes it took me 45 minutes to complete the battle because of micro positioning errors. If the mouse and arrow keys were implemented better the game would have been a lot more fun. In addition to the precision problems, a fair number of critical actions required 3 or 4 key chords. I'm a lifelong touch typist and play the guitar and found some of the stretches a bit challenging.
Overall I enjoyed it. It's hard. Some of the difficult things you need to do are coordination problems and some are made harder by randomization. It can be frustrating repeating the same set of actions in a given situation and getting wildly different results. Sometimes the "landscape" seems different from trial to trial as you attempt to solve a problem. I would never have completed the game without relying on walk throughs. Doing what's required, even with explicit instructions, took lots of practice and the right combination of random factors. The game's story is fun for Lovecraft fans. It's based mostly on "The Shadow over Innsmouth," but takes elements from other stories. The only bug I encountered was not an impediment to completion. Escaping from an elevator is supposed to require a lit up emergency open button. The button never lights up but escape is possible. The dreaded no lights on the reef bug is fixed in this version. The game did crash a few times but picked up just fine after a restart. I had to do some gardening on the save directory a couple of times and in the Marsh Factory section of the game you have to save repeatedly to make a save visible. All in all, I had a good time. The plot was comic booky but fun. The monsters looked monstrous. The Deep Ones owed a bit to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. One peculiar thing was that the fish people all talked like pirates. "Outsiderrr..."
