In Sound Mind

I had a really great time with this game. Despite some rough edges—which may turn off some gamers—it is big, bold, and crammed with adventure and exploration. It features large, well-designed spaces with lots of hidden nooks, crannies, secrets, and environmental puzzles. There's some combat, too, but luckily not too much of it. Combat is good enough, even fun, and presents a nice change of pace. As a whole the game is not quite "horror" enough for true horror fans, but it's tense and exciting and there was never a dull moment in almost 20 hours of play.

A neat part of the game is that each of its main spaces fit well within a ~3 hour game session. This episodic design makes you feel like you've accomplished something when you quit for the day, without leaving any loose threads. There's also a kind of hub environment that you always return to, and which is in itself a space you will continuously explore.

But there were groan-inducing and frustrating moments. The game was released in 2021, but looks and feels like it was released a decade earlier. Textures are low-resolution and have a bland color palette. The graphics just don't do justice to the level design. Worse, controls and level geometry feel like they were ripped out from a linear FPS from the 90s. It could do with a remake.

My main gripe is the story, which I guess is "psychological horror", strongly inspired by the Alan Wake games. Unfortunately, it teeters strongly between "OK, cool, I guess" and pure cringe. It's centered around therapy depicted as a caricature of how real therapy works. The premise is essentially that of a X Files episode, with "the government" pulling the strings, and you can pretty much guess the whole plot early on in the game. Some of the voice acting is fine, but too much of it sounds like it was made for a second-rate horror flick. There's also a soundtrack of sorts, which you have to manually play in the game, by a band called The Living Tombstone. It is so cringey as to be comical. Luckily you can listen to the beginning of each track and decide to stop before it rots your brain cells.

I didn't experience significant bugginess except with achievements. At least on Epic many are broken and did not activate for me without jumping through silly hoops. That was annoying because I worked especially hard to gather the collectibles. Many other reviewers, however, complain about game bugs. There have been patches, so maybe this is no longer an issue.

All in all, I strongly recommend it, especially for fans of exploration and environmental puzzles. It's a remarkable success for a small indie team.