With the Extra Life marathon come and gone (and incidentally, they are still taking donations till the end of the year so if you want to help us heal sick kids, there is still time... and thank you VERY much), it was time to fill in the space a completed game during the marathon would open and the dice offered something fairly interesting this time: a free title offered on Steam featuring a time-loop of horror in space. How could I say no to that?
Story: Honestly I don't know what the story to this game is. The only certainty here is that you wake up onboard what appears to be a space station... at least I think it's a station. Could be a spacecraft of some sort, but the hallway curvature and lights outside the one window you can really look out suggest to me a grounded structure. But in either case, you are not on Earth, and it looks like you are the only one awake... as if maybe you should not be. Something is very very wrong. And no, you are not alone.
Outside of that, the game is incredibly ambiguous about what is going on, enough so that there is a steam community forum dedicated to talking about the plot, and while there are some wild theories, no one has any concrete explanations.
However, that is not to say the "writing" is bad. This game is a bite-sized example of the environment telling it's own story. In fact what you take out of this one, you will take out of the details of the world itself, including what I have laid out for you. What that story says to you may well vary from person to person, but it definitely screams "something very bad happened and may still be happening" on this station without so much as a word spoken. I can't call it a masterpiece by any means, but there is something interesting here, and I will have to leave it to you to put the pieces together and let you draw your own conclusions what that is.
6/10
Graphics: Honestly, this game looks absolutely gorgeous. From the second you step outside your tube, you are greeted by a dingy space station with open tubes and wiring all around: a place built for utility over looks, and it sets the tone brilliantly. Everything looks like the developers lovingly crafted it to fit their vision perfectly, and well it should because this is what you are going to see for basically the entire game. You do not have a lot of space to explore, so you will be looking over every detail repeatedly before the game is over, and likely you may still miss something that could have hinted at just what the hell happened here. It's incredibly atmospheric in ways I'm pretty sure anything short of recent hardware could not have done. I say this because the game defaulted to "high" settings for me and it still had to chug from time to time on a GPU that was released about 3 years ago as of writing.
But that is not to say the game is perfect. There are a few other living things with you on this station, and this is where the game falters. The featured "pet rat" for example, has the most disturbingly fake eyes I have ever seen in a model! It just seems to be the case that this team really was too new to know how to make the few living things you run into look good and the shock becomes even more apparent when you see it compared to everything static in the world around you in all it's gloriously worked detail.
8/10
Sound: This is an "empty" station and as such, you can expect to hear a lot more humming and whirring of machines then activity of living beings around you, and the game lives up to this. Most of the game is played without any music at all, letting the world take you in that much more in it's loneliness as you hear your own steps echo through the empty halls. And with the exception of a few tension-enhancing notes here and there, that is all you will get besides a droning tone during the opening menu and the end credits. It works exceptionally well to play into the atmosphere it's and drives everything home as you become acutely aware of any change in what you hear for the entire game. This is one of those times where less was definitely more.
9/10
Gameplay: When PT dropped on the PS4 back in the day, it inspired a whole bunch of clone games on various platforms. This would be one of them. You will leave your cryo-pod to enter a hallway with only one way to go. You must go forward through the section of the station, investigating everything you run into as you explore. Ultimately, you will find a doorway that, once opened, will send you back to the beginning, only something has changed. As you repeat the game these changes will tell what story it has and even define the goal for you in the process. And to this end the game does very well.
However, this is about all the game does as your total interaction will be to walk and run around and, when you find something you can interact with, manipulate the angle you see it at and take it's photo. These photos will be the central point of the little gameplay the game offers, but to explain more is to ruin what the discovery. Suffice it to say this is more like a haunted house then what you traditionally think of as a horror game.
And yet, this works exceptionally well for what the game is trying to do. It's not much, but the game can be completed in 15-20 minutes if you rush and taking your time (as I did) will finish it in under an hour, so it's over before the lack of interactivity really hurts anything. And all things, even that limited interactivity serve the atmosphere first and foremost to create a small slice of horror.
6/10
Bugs: I have heard this game is a bit of a buggy mess, but I didn't notice any issues when I played. It ran as well as could be expected. (If not perfectly smooth.)
Score: This game offers far from a bad time. You will enter the world, explore and get creeped out on occasion, and meet your fate (good or bad) in a single sitting. The game is so short, you likely will not notice the lack of a save unless you get the bad ending, but that shortness, even as it serves the game well, also points out it's weakness. It just doesn't offer much on the way, and in fact the entire challenge is a single puzzle which really isn't much of a challenge when you are finally able to look at it with all the pieces in front of you.
If you like horror games, it's definitely worth checking this one out, especially as it's free and won't take up too much of your time. But aside from fans of the creepy, there are not many who should waste their time with it.
7/10
System Requirements:
- Quad core Intel or AMD processor
- 8 GB RAM
- NVidia Geforce 960
- 8 GB hard drive space
- Windows 7
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
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