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1. H

   • hawood

   This game is impressive, original, and kinda weird... to say the least. Firstly the graphics: it's not free roam 3d but you can look around in a sphere and sometimes it's just still. Overall it has that late-1990s movie CGI look to me: not compromised by the constraints realtime engines have, but not perfectly photorealistic either. It would be nice to see animations in the free look views rather than lining up the camera before playing them, so that the camera can still move but at least you can interact with things that have nice animations. The music and atmosphere are creepy and sometimes more melancholy. It must have started development when liminal space games were everywhere on steam but despite the empty building cliche it still feels like a real place and the soundscape is eerie. I appreciated that it was truly point-and-click. The puzzles don't even feel like puzzles here but you still have to think hard and pay attention. You're mostly getting passwords and codes or finding items, but it all fits into place without esoteric "moon logic". You have to play this without thinking you're in a game and most importantly, WRITE THINGS DOWN. Apart from that, it was unclear what was going on in the story at the start when you enter the building although you soon work out you're meant to be heading up the stairs. Unlike more fantasy adventures, you're not going to be suddenly faced with a lights-out puzzle, or **match up Earth Wind Fire Water to the colored shapes!**, but instead it is grounded in using real world items like screwdrivers, fuses, ladders, and so on. Sometimes the click areas were awkward or I missed obvious things, and if you aren't concentrating on the story and who's who then you're not going to make it to the end. Once you get to the top floor, the story really accelerates and you are faced with a lot more things to explore. References to financial jargon are dropped in here and there and the wooden models scattered around the building (the titanic, the Hindenburg, the tower of Babel?) are definitely trying to poke fun at big-finance. I finished it wanting to dive deeper. I treated it too much like a bunch of puzzles at first, but the story is important to understanding what to do. I was playing near release when there were no hints at all. The acting is good. The real people in this game have been integrated into the graphics very well, which personally I find refreshing as it brings it to life compared to using models. It was fun taunting one the characters over and over by knocking on his door, listening to all his different lines. There is some poor AI voice acting in one or two places or these TTS voices with effects near the beginning of the game. I'm glad to see the developers added subtitles after release which also helped with a difficult music puzzle. There's an entire radio news broadcast in the kitchen which first I thought must have been there for a puzzle reason, but no, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd have in the real world. I love stuff like that and credit to the developers for their world-building and attention to detail, even when it's not critical to the main puzzles.

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