I checked the demo of this months ago, and the easy answer was that it was very dreary, claustrophobic, and densely terrifying. And it still is. This game has had an effect on me, weaving a narrative of its visceral aftermath in a dystopic future and the characters caught up in it. It has unusual storytelling, dense atmosphere, and feels like a pure survival horror that all the 90s boom were about.
But while my sense were being completely occupied by intense focus and hyper awareness of its scary nature. The nature of its story became even more terrifying the further I progressed into this survival horror game. I feel like it's better if I describe below about my experience to get a grasp of the kind of game that this is. And to be honest, I still feel pretty dazed about it.
It's all about the red and black, but moving on from that. The game starts with a replika(this version of androids) variant named Elster. After her ship crashes with her human pilot while on a voyage to seek inhabitable new lands, Elster goes out to look for her through what I assumed at first was a ship occupied by monsters from the demo, I was wrong. The real thing starts when the game just outright skips a few moments to Elster in the bathroom, right on the first floor of the facility she found.
Everything seems off, nobody's around, there are wreckage and holes on the floor. Elster finds mutated corpses of other replikas, filled with lesions, purpura, and other sicknesses. The surviving few replikas warn her to go away, but she needs to get her partner back safely, so she continues onwards, and from here, nothing is as it should it have been.
I was thrown off by the weird skip from the outskirts of the facility, then after this haunting dream sequence, going right into the facility bathroom. It then immediately dawned on me that the information being fed to me about what's going on will be discombobulated. And that is the nature of the game, it's disjointed in a pretty visceral way, and nothing helps to take that feeling away. It just sticks with me for a long time.
Nevermind the fact that it's based in a dystopian world, where people are forced to hear propaganda and follow the doctrines of an empire. A lot of mixed languages from Russian, German, Japanese, Korean, to mostly simple Chinese written across. Echoing this multi-culture partnership that doesn't seem to be going well, and right smack dab in a facility where human workers and replikants are all women, except for one guy being in charge. That is saying something, but I can't seem to get a grasp of it.
So I stopped thinking and tried to survive my way into a facility full of deceased robots with intent to kill. It didn't seem like an actual scary setup, and that all of it could be for just evoking that feel for the sake of immersion. Again, underestimating this only made it worse.
And there's so much to uncover about the replikants, their psych reports detailing alongside their disfiguration paints a pretty ugly of how messy things got. There are various models of them, including heavyweights, and bruiser types. Of least, they don't know how to use a gun, but I had to stop assuming that because the game just kept throwing surprises at me.
It feels like it's largely inspired by Resident Evil, and Silent Hill. But has elements of body horror, mixed in with existential dread, and Lovecraftian elements. There are moments where it even got Lynchian, with a slight bit of Ergo Proxy going on on the story end.
Despite what it might seem like, I don't always run away from combat. But doesn't mean I always have to engage, either. It encourages anyone to ration supplies, and use them well when needed. Ammo is scarce. The other issue is the 6 slot inventory space, including for weapons, and there's no way of getting around that. Changing weapons means you have to access the item menu, but the neat aspect is the secondary equips like the disposable electron batons, and flashlight.
As I've mentioned, the gameplay is largely similar to Resident Evil games. The early ones. You can combine items, sometimes for increasing potency for your repair sprays or for doing item puzzle solving for the stuff you find that you'll need to advance through the game. Speaking of, the puzzle sections in this game need you to put a lot of thinking into them as well. It adds to the frustrating tension of the game, and I actually like it.
The funny thing is, along my 8hrs of playtime, I never did die once. But the sense of dread and tension from the atmosphere still retained. I was constantly trying to see if I could evade, or maybe had to engage the enemies. Another thing was that they only remain dead, until certain points of the game they come back to life. Because the virus inside them regenerates, unless I use a thermite to burn their corpse entirely.
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Certain zombies will have shields, and require flanking and more firepower to put down. Then there are these that are completely freakazoids, needing me to match the radio frequency broadcasting in order to let its head pop off and die. But occasionally I would let two or three line up together, before I take em out with a shotgun. There are all sorts of weapons to find, including somewhere an automatic rifle.
Levels get more tense, especially since you have to backtrack quite a bit. But if you're not good with dealing with the 6 slot inventory space, which you'll need some vacancies for story items, then there's the hurdle of backtracking a lot to go to safe houses for putting stuff back. Oh yeah, the save system is only manual from the safe house.
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I honestly kept forgetting what I was doing all this for, because the disjointed narrative was telling me all sorts of stories. I would get these flashback moments in first person mode, where I am walking slowly to uncover stuff before I get a certain item needed to progress. Which is weird, because the item was never there before the dream phase. Adds to the enigma of the story as well. There are multiple characters with different roles in the game, other times it throws twists and subverts their roles too. It ends all hazy, and open to interpretations.
Adding to the sense of hopelessness is the distorted, gnawing post-industrial soundtrack. The music only plays during combat, creating mood in a few rooms, and pivotal story moments. Rest is just silence.
The way I described this game would make it sound like a cool survival horror game. But it is sooo much more. Outside the homage for older games, especially seeing from the unique artstyle, the atmosphere here thaws out hard. It is an unsettling game to play, but also one that makes me very curious to know what is underneath the skin. I went deeper into the abyss, and I was not disappointed at all. I had a blast playing it, there's also it having multiple endings, but ah, think I'll give myself a bit of a rest before I redo my playthrough.
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