The Painscreek Killings
The "walking simulator" epithet is misleading: this is in fact a very difficult puzzle adventure. It requires actual detective work, a careful eye for small details, patience for poring through documents again and again to look for subtle clues, and even some spatial reasoning. At times it can be tedious, and as I'll detail below some aspects of the gameplay make it a more frustrating experience than it needs to be. But, for those of us who light up with they hear "difficult puzzle adventure," this is a rewarding game.
The heartbreaking, gripping story is wonderfully told. It makes excellent use of a familiar narrative technique, comprising almost entirely of diaries and other documents that you find and collect. "The plot thickens" as you progressively peel off layers and unravel deeper and darker threads for a set of characters with whom you'll become quite familiar. It's as satisfying as any good detective novel or crime TV series.
The setting, too, is quite immersive. Though the graphics are unimpressive and repetitive, the game world is crafted with attention to detail. There's a Twin Peaks flair to the milieu, with one major difference: it's an empty, dead town. Though the lack of other people to talk to is integral to the story, after some time it does feel a bit too bleak and disagreeable.
But that's a quibble. My main criticism is the gameplay mechanics. We're used to seeing games like this rendered in 2D, and this game is actually a good example of why 3D is usually a bad idea. Though it's immersive to move about in 1st person and 6 degrees, this "walking simulator" nonsense starts to be annoying even in the early stages of the game, as it can take minutes to move from one location to the next. And this game heavily relies on backtracking. If the graphics were more beautiful, if the world was more delightful to casually move through, perhaps this could have worked. But it's just a chore.
Furthermore, as many others have pointed out, not only is there not much happening in the world, but the little it does have amounts to far too many red herrings. Too many cupboards that have nothing inside them. Too many doors that will stay locked forever and have no game content behind them. Though these details fit the world's logic and contribute to making the setting feel more real, there's just far too much of it. User DefiantPanda called this game a "drawer-opening simulator," and that's tragically apt.
The real frustration comes when you realize that rarely, but importantly, one of these yet-another cupboards will reveal an important clue. Quite a few of these clues lead to optional documents (and achievements), and thus may only be of interest to completionists. However, it's pretty much impossible without the benefit of hindsight to know which clue belongs to a "side quest" and which is the main story. And so you have to check them all.
Finally, the 3D is just awkwardly implemented. Many games of this type suffer from "pixel perfection," in which you have to click at exactly the right place for something to happen, and if you don't then there's no indication that you're even close. Painscreek does this quite a bit. Also, the 3D motion controls are painfully rigid. I played with an Xbox controller, and though I'm grateful for the ability to adjust the camera sensitivity, I still felt motion to be very jarring.
All in all, I'm glad that Painscreek is decidedly 3D, even if it feels experimental. The sense of "being there" is significant, and there's a satisfaction to 3D exploration that can't be implemented in 2D. But the flaws should be addressed by future games of this type: 1) if you're going to rely on backtracking a lot, make it fast, 2) nobody enjoys pixel hunting, so please provide more indication, and 3) while areas of bleak emptiness are great for atmosphere, please make your game world rich and crammed with delight in order to properly reward exploration.