Cryptic/Mystic/semi-horror story, well it's quite my taste and the setup is very engaging. The game uncover itself crumb after crumb and I really wanted to see what was coming next! The following will be subjective: - Like I stated in the introduction, story and ambiance were the selling points. A strange, shrouded history with an interesting concept of storytelling. - The 2D arts are very good but the whole stuff is a tad bland. You get pretty panoramas with not half bad melancholic piano/violon soundtrack in the background, some rare scenes are great and cryptics but most of the time the decors on a level look all the same (most does not even make sense on a practical matter) and the points of interest are scarce. - The gameplay is better than a rain recording to start making me yawn. A game does not need to have monster to fight (even if there are here), does not need to have a skill tree or complex puzzles/pixel perfect jumps, but in my opinion it's gameplay has to keep me engaged and mindful. It's a (slow)walking simulator with pits; backtracking and boring ennemies. Most of the hzazards or puzzles are trivial and are requiring you to backtrack or to wait, oh you'll wait, A LOT. Most of the time I missed a puzzle or died against an ennemy was because I just do not have the patience the wait for the game to make it"s stuff. I'm quite happy to look at good arts but I also need to play, here the gameplay and mapping are intentionnaly made to slow you down, to force you to wait and look at the art, you don't have to connect brain cells or be mindfull, just to press forward and wait most of the time, it's a terrible concept in my opinion. Final: Story was engaging, truly, I was still playing in order to uncover it even if as stated above I find the art and gameplay a bit boring. I encountered a technical issue on my side. At the end of a certain level (black pond) the game saves then fades to black as usual, then it just ... doesn't do anything, I can click on every button or wait forever just nothing happen, relaunching the game and reaching the end of the level multiple times give me the same outcome again and again. I'll have to watch the rest of the game on video, a bit disappointing...
I love the game and I love all the quality mods we can get on the web to make this experience even better. As I was updating some outdated mods I found for my personnal usage I discovered that some code has disappeared from 1.4 to 1.5. (The real expression would be: code has been moved) A keyword used to make Helmet and FaceCover overlap (used mainly by Armor mods for GasMask, Baclava and other multilayer headgears) is not recognized anymore by the game in 1.5 - when the DLC introducing GasMasks was released- and all the related mods are now broken (xml config issues and visual in-game issues). I noticed that the same thing happened for multilayer apparels when capes where added in another DLC, we were able to create capes mod from the original code but again critical componets from the base game have been moved to the DLCs during the most recent base game updates. I'm not complaining about price or the quality of the DLC (which look great from reviews perspective) but is that fair to remove code from the base game (what we already paid for and breaking incredible modders work by the way) in order to force sell new content? I'm not sure that this is a fair practice.
