The visuals are nice. But they come at the price of bad optimization and still lots of bugs. This is a walking simulator, but the problem is, that the 'walking' part is slow and the protagonist often gets stuck without any obstacle. The only thing that helps is reloading the last checkpoint or restarting the level. Which gets tedious quickly. The beautiful scenery is also prone to flickering and disappearing textures.
So this is only a 'game' for players with high end machines and a lot of patience. But honestly you're better of watching a Let's Play of this 'game'. The amount of interaction will be about the same.
I repeatedly encounter a VERY serious bug in this game. The game is divided into Chapters. During each Chapter there are automatic checkpoints. You're supposed to be able to exit anytime and resume at the last checkpoint. Sounds good, but there is a major bug.
Every time I exit after a checkpoint and try to resume at that checkpoint, the checkpoint loads, but Szymon is stuck in place. I can look around, and I can see Szymon's legs moving and hear the sound of his footsteps. But he is frozen in place.
The only way I can play is by restarting the Chapter at the beginning.
For some reason, the developers in their eternal wisdom and superior intelligence, only use a single checkpoint that is overwritten every time....Idiots!!
As far as story, graphics, voice acting, and audio, the game is pretty good. Gameplay is a little light, even for a walking simulator. All you can do is walk around, read notes, use the radio to talk to Eve, replay the memory tubes. Finally as most reviewers mention, walking is painfully slow. And running just barely increases how fast you move. Running in this game is slower than walking in other games.
Graphics - 4.5 stars
Voice Acting - 4 stars
Story - 3.5 stars
Sound - 3 stars
Gameplay C - 2 stars
I'm not asking for a refund because I don't want GOG to loose out on their cut of the sale. GOG shouldn't pay because the developers suck. If GOG goes away, then we'll be stuck with only Steam, Origin, Ubisoft, etc. Have to all do what we can to ensure GOG stays around as an alternative.
My advice is look for another game on GOG. Don't take a chance with this game. You may be lucky and not encounter this bug. But then again, why risk it. Spend your money at GOG on a game that isn't buggy.
Unplayable due to terrible peformance (5700XT, 16GB 3600, R5 2600), and lowering the settings barely help. It runs on Unreal 4 but the devs evidently didn't have any idea what they were doing. And yes, the game looks decent on max settings, but the FPS tanks to anywhere between 20 to 50. Lowering the settings to the absolute minimum does give you more frames, but the game won't look that good anymore, obviously. And playing a game of this type that doesn't look good? Not a great experience, especially when the visuals are supposed to be a big part of it.
Also the in-game walking speed is ridiculously low and the game is basically just walking. And yes, I get that you are supposed to "take in" the world and the atmosphere but slow movement has never been needed for that. Stalker, Morrowind, Crysis etc. have already proven that. You can be fast and get immersed at the same time. Forcing the player to walk extremely slowly says to me that the game designers didn't even consider that, or didn't have faith in their ability to create a world that was immersive enough for players to decide to stop and look around. I can zoom around in Crysis 3 like a madman and still occasionally stop to look around and go "wow" because the world simply looks good. Games that didn't even try to be "immersive walking simulators" have been more immersive than this garbage. So in this game, instead of taking in the world, I clicked the uninstall button. That was the most satisfying thing I experienced while playing this game.
Overall this product is pathetic in its technicality and its design.
Yup, it's a mix of Dear Esther, Wolfenstein The New Order, and Bioshock. In that it's a non-combat exploration experience (aka 'walking simulator') set in a hidden sealed away fallen utopia built by the Nazis but with retrofuturist technology.
At times waaaay too dark to make anything out even with your gamma cranked way up (annoying - where was the zippo used in the first area as a way to make light?), a *very* slow walking pace which I can understand is to make you look around and find the story clues rather than just rush through like someone swapped your Ritalin for caffeine tablets, some annoying glitches (reloading from a checkpoint and being stuck on some stairs unable to move, requiring a restart of the chapter), and no option to replay chapters from the main menu, only a New Game... but I still wouldn't say I didn't like Paradise Lost. I've had far worse times with far bigger games. You can pretty much see the plot beats coming a mile off but it's got the kind of captivating bleakness that works well with a story like this, and visually it's very impressive for a project of its nature.
Framing the chapters with the names of the Kubler-Ross 'Five Stages of Grief' model felt like an unwise attempt to add gravitas (especially as it skips 'Bargaining') - come on, you're dealing with a nuclear winter and a Nazi gotterdamerung project, that's already plenty heavy enough! From the ending I reached it wasn't really very clear what the outcome of my choice was, and I missed a couple of areas due to one-way transitions, but I suspect I'm going to play through again just to make other choices and find out.
The initial visuals and atmosphere were pretty nice, and I was enjoying the start of the game.
When I next start the game up, I cant move my character. So i restart the game from the beginning, as the problem happened on prior checkpoint too, as there is only 1 save game.
I start the game again later, and I am frozen in place again. Google tells me I need to turn of "head bobbing" setting, idiot, so I do that. Aaaaand, it worked 1 time only. Uninstalled this game as I will never wast another minute of my life on this buggy disaster. Big dissapointment.
