Recent reviews by Roboerbot

For Managed Democracy!

- Wait 10 minutes on every start up to wait for shaders to compile.
- Sit through lengthy loading screen just to spawn into a game where the foliage, trees, and objects have not spawned in yet. - Sprint to outrun the spawn time on nearby objects.
- Press button to heal only to see that game has not loaded in the healing animation yet after a few minutes of play, so no health for you.

This one is not finished cooking.

The game, music, and visuals are peak vibes.

I would not recommend this game unless you love the art of H. R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski AND can get this game at a heavy discount, perhaps around 50% off during a sale. You get weapons, but they are so frustrating to use you are better off running away from enemies until they wander off and despawn, or baiting them around a circle and running past them. Most of the enemies do that, but there are a few brief periods where you have to get into combat. Without spoiling anything yet, the story and lore are practically non-existent. The art book tells you what the authors were going for, but if you believe in "death of the author" you will find very little to grab onto in terms of narrative or lore. I've seen snippets of text from the art book and the ideas they present there about what certain creatures or locations are not properly presented in the game or are just not in the game at all.

The game is disappointingly short. The ways you deal with enemies are boring or frustrating. The puzzles are sparse for the price tag and some are very simple. Some puzzles repeat a few times back to back, increasing in complexity. A couple puzzles happen only once. By the time you properly learn a puzzle concept and are ready for it to increase in complexity it is dropped from the game as you move onto a new area. There are no loading screens but the game areas are all linear. You may run around an area to solve puzzles but once it is done you never come back. There is one "moral choice" in this game near the beginning and you likely not know the implications of the options at the time and may even misinterpret them entirely, making the choice uninformed and thus not good at making the player think about their own morals. Its effects last for about a minute. It does not effect anything of note, just how you open a door to progress and then leave the area behind. It does not effect the ending, or the middle, or the beginning.

There are not secrets or collectibles. I found 1 ammo station around a corner that could be easily missed, but it triggered a scripted ambush with tough enemies that chew through your ammo and spawn enemies in front of and behind you in a hall way. You might as well just skip this ammo station if you know about it.

You see everything in the game by progressing normally and there is 0 replay value. Even with the one choice in the beginning you are better off looking a 60 second video of it if you are curious. There are no collectibles or hidden things regarding the lore or narrative that you can easily miss.

SPOILERS BELOW






I've read this game described as being about abortion, birth, still birth, transcendence, and class struggle. The truth is that you can project many things onto it since it gives no definite answer. If it is an allegory, it isn't exactly clear what it is an allegory for. I find the most credible explanation is that it is an allegory for birth, with you being like a fetus with the ending being about birth or still birth. You will not find out the motivations of characters, including your player character as you travel through the world. You will not get an answer to what transcendence means in the concrete terms of the world, or what caused the world to be the way it is. You can kind of guess that people in the world did horrifying things, maybe accidentally made some parasite or plague which effected their biological technology that is everywhere, and then "transcended" away. Your character is following in their foot steps but you don't know why or what the implications of everything is. There are some murals and statues at the end which don't shed much light but tell you the people in this society valued reproduction or rebirth.

Like Fallout 76, but better!