As I say in a lot of games I review this is far from a perfect game. However, it is a damn good one with a couple rough spots around stealth sections (one particularly brutal one that will get a lot of people to stop playing). If you can stick with it through those, however there is a truly awesome Lovecraftian horror experience here that many fans of cosmic horror will absolutely love and have been waiting a long time for.
I've played this game 2 times and preparing to do a next run in a while so it does offer a sort of replayability but not right after you finish the game.
The voice of Edward Pierce is the same with Jonathan Reid from Vampyr. It is nice to hear him in a good Lovecraftian story. The game offers a fairly wide approach in character role playing. You do have some branches to choose from to aid you in your investigation and how the story proceeds but they are not explored that much, it does not dive too deep but it is well within the budget and lenght of the game. Maybe in the second title? They seem experimental but well put.
The story is interesting, characters play well, sound design is a bit off but you get used to it, the soundtrack has its great moments and the overal tone and atmosphere is quite creepy. Voice acting is mostly well done, there are lots of things to discover (read, collect, investigate), the skill tree does a good job influencing heavy on your play style as you move through the story. The atmosphere the graphics offer through those greenish "sick" tones do a great job with the overal theme.
At the end of the day you have a great adventure horror game with more than 5 hours to play if you do not rush things and take your time to dive into the universe.
Lets get the bad out of the way first - the RPG system skills are kinda useless and only affect dialogue options. You get so no indication WHICH dialogue option ends the conversation, so keep that in mind. There is no combat whatsover and the sneak segments are not that good.
What the games DOES good is the atmosphere - the characters, the terror of the unknown, the madness, the slow realisation of the hopelessness of manking.
If you want more combat oriented game - The Sinking City or Dark Corners of the Earth are a better choise.
This is more of an interactive movie, than a game and if you have no expectations whatsoever (for example you dont know HPL novels) you´ll probably love it. You might even if you know his work, but that´s not my case, so not sure.
The story just grabs you and won´t let go until its over and it´s completely awesome! There are unexpected twists, awesome visual, the setting is breathtaking and eerie, I loved descriptions on characters and items, which give this "movie" such depth, various endings and game progressions to some extent are also great. Really enjoyed this and I would recommend it to everyone, but people who need to have great game mechanics, which gets me to cons of this "game/movie".
This title does not deserve to be rated and described as a game, even though it technically is. Visual is nice as I said, but the detail is poor, especially passage in the hospital, where enviroment mostly looks like a game from 2006, but it´s not just that, everything lacks detail and there was probably not much work given to it, really this is just bad.
Even worse, from a game standpoint of view is that gameplay mechanics are scarce whatsoever and even these are flawed and too bland, stealth passages are just meh, but at least it won´t bother people who hate these.
What´s good in all this is that the game is at least stable, there were no bugs for me and it runs well even on weak computers.
Don´t get me wrong, I love this title and I´m sure you will too if you´re a right person for it, but it needs to be said that it has its flaws and they´re huge.
I rate it 5* as an adventure and 2* as a game. This topic or even this particular game needs to be (re)done by someone much better at games.
A very good adventure game. Yes, the gameplay is not as fun as in, let's say, Dark Corners of the Earth, but if you take it as an adventure game / walking simulator / a visual novel, then it is a really good game. The visuals and voice-over build great atmosphere. It has multiple endings and your choices change some parts of the story. This game deserves more praise.