This game is full of problems, from technicals (open doors respond very strangely to the "close" action) to bad character building (after 30 minutes, little of the story and character decisions made sense. Also no choices changed the outcome of any discussion), through bad gameplay (the main character claims to have lost her key, the game switches to "End of the Day" instead of looking for said keys wtf?) and useless "interactive" repeated assets.
In the end, this game feels like a bad novel in a bad environment.
The game has some issues with controls but generally a beautiful picture and creepy enough locations, but it all fades when you get to know the whole storyline. Spoilers below (just in case), but honestly I just advise you not buy it, discount or not.
From the start of the story we find out, that when the main character (Nicole) was 16, it turned out that her father was raping ("had an affair", I believe, it is said in the story) a 16-year old girl, Nicole's classmate - Rachel Foster. Eventually Rachel got pregnant and committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. At the same evening the news of "the affair" got out, Nicole's mom understandably had a huge scandal with her husband and left, taking her daughter with her.
In the game Nicole returns to the family hotel where the whole story happened, to sell it after her father's death. Instead she gets locked in it by a snow storm. This serves as a start of a horror exploration game, which would have been nice, if in the end you didn't find out, that a 40+ aged man, having sex with an underaged girl same age as his daughter (we can assume, that Rachel was 15 or even 14, when the whole "affair" started) is a misunderstood martyr, the whole abuse story was, in fact, true love, Nicole's mother killed Rachel out of jealousy, and the best way to deal with this info is to commit suicide.
The game says that it deals with triggering and difficult topics, and like hell it does, but crushes and burns while doing so. As many other reviewers have already mentioned, it truly seems that the whole game was created to state, that child molestation is ok.
Simply disgusting.
The mechanics and voice acting and stuff are all good but...well the title said it. There's a character who is a pedophile and its treated as though everyone was wrong but him, he just loved someone and they couldn't understand that. It's like the thesis of the entire game. Its gross. Really gross. And super irresponsible, jesus
A exploration game like this needs a memorable location, but the fairly ordinary hotel in this game just doesn't do it. Some hidden passages and three secret hideouts are basically all the intrigue. This is definitely not the hotel in Shining, which I would've loved to visit instead. The story is well-meaning (involving the death of a 16-year-old girl who had dated an older man), but it is fairly slight as well. The "pedophilia angle" of this game is a non-issue since its presence is purely incidental; and the game doesn't take a moral stance about it at all, since a whole different crime is involved. Gameplay is limited as well, as there are few puzzles and few objectives. Basically, the "world" of this game just isn't as interesting. This isn't 2013 anymore when Gone Home first came out. This genre has evolved a great deal, and some games of this type create unforgettable worlds, such as What Remains of Edith Finch, Close to the Sun (a disappointing game but a richly designed location), Stanley Parable, Observation, Tacoma, Among the Sleep, etc. The field is far more competitive today, so small and big studios alike all have to literally raise their games.
The Game might might have the most terrific story but I will never know. I feel like I was bashing my head against a brick wall playing it.
The game feels like it was designed to be deliberately hostile to the player, with aggressive head bobbing, intense depth of field and an oppressively narrow field of view I was unable to make it past the first day.
Some of these things like the post-processing effects can be fixed in the ini settings but most you will just have to deal with.
The worst part is that these issues would be (presumably) easy for the developers to patch, but after two years with no word this doesn't seem likely.
If this gets patched I might try it again.
