Warning: this review may contain some spoilers.

Introduction
Subject is a piece of interactive fiction centered around a test subject who wakes up in a very dark room, with a bandage-wrapped face. The aim of the game is to use the power of your senses (sight, smell, sound) to discover the truth behind the mystery. And the mystery is indeed dark. Exploration of what seems to be an experimental facility leads to some astonishing revelations about the nature of the facility, and that all is not what it seems. Full of twists and turns, there is enough to keep the player captivated until the very end.



Presentation
Subject pays high attention to detail, with emphasis on polish, and presentation values. Indrah knows how to make the newcomer feel comfortable. She has a keen sense of appreciation for newbies and is willing to explain things like controls, and thus create a seamless experience for people who don't play RPG Maker games often. That combined with a slick interface and an aversion to bugs, the game is waterproof and airtight.

Graphics/Sound
Crisp, clean graphical style. I believe that marimo provided a lot of the visual assets to this game, and what I believe she has drawn, it is quite spectacular and lends a lot to Subject's atmosphere. Ambient, pulsating music coupled with piano refrains set the tone. Beautiful violins soaring above contemplative soundscapes. Subject paints a grim view of your surroundings, and the developers take great command of atmosphere. Haunting, atmospheric and beautiful.

Story
The story is unique, with brilliant pacing, but the endings are a mixed bag of satisfying and confusing. You are wrapped in bandages and you don't know why. Beyond that, you explore. Dark, abandoned hallways, and everything described in several senses: look, taste, touch, smell, sound. This is a very unique feature of Subject, in that it attempts to appeal to all your senses, not just audio and visual. The pacing is delicate, calculating, menacing. The mysteries are always confounding, strange, sometimes unexplained. Even if you can't wrap your head around the story, maybe this is a good thing. A genius sequence of "user logs" summarizing the aftermath of your actions are both mysterious and cunningly writ.

There are flaws, though. Descriptions of every single sound and smell become monotonous, especially if every time you go to listen it is almost always wind, not scary monster sounds or anything like that. There are often very arbitrary choices that lead to endings, too, and often I am not sure whether the endings are bad or good. Some repeat each other, some I felt were unnecessary. Even the endings that I consider to be "good" did not reveal enough information about the situation, and I was left feeling vaguely unsatisfied. But then again, there's always the chance to discover another ending.



Endings
Warning: This section contains spoilers.

Ending #1: Frozen
Well, as the title suggests, you get frozen in a freezer. Guess I didn't see it coming, but it does indicate your primal urge to eat so much that you might be frozen. Perhaps someone closed the fridge door behind me and that was it. I like that even if you smell the food you are engrossed by it. Must have some beast-attracting hormones. 7/10.

Ending #2: Capture
This was a pretty hard ending to find. It didn't reveal much. I was expecting more. 3/10.

Ending #3: Stasis
Well at least they introduced the *things* as "troubling elements". I'm still not sure how the story fits together, though. 6/10.

Ending #4: Rescue
My least favourite ending. I just didn't *get* it. Did the subject get rescued? How? What even happened? Confusing. 2/10.

Ending #5: Escape
My favourite ending. The feeling of lost hope, that you really can't escape, no matter how hard you try. This was my first ending, and I thought maybe I could escape on my first try, but I was wrong. The ending indicates that I escape, but I fainted, and the aftermath-log-guy found me, so it brought my hopes down beautifully. False hope. 9/10.

Ending #6: Monster
This was both good and bad. It was good in that it divulged the most important twist: But, being the most rewarding ending (in terms of information), I feel like it fails. Why, you ask? Because this is supposed to be the *bad* ending, isn't it? Why should I be rewarded with information about myself if I did everything wrong? Shouldn't I be rewarded with this epiphany if I did everything *right* instead? It doesn't make sense. Still, I liked the twist, though. 6/10.

Ending #7: Trap
I wasn't even sure what he ate. Was it the fresh corpse? Or was it something else from the freezer. Also, I was pretty sure the freezer was in the other room, how did I get to it from here? And how did we faint? 4/10.

Ending #8: Freedom
It was good because it was the *good* ending, the one to beat them all. However, it was bad because the explanation wasn't long enough! This is supposed to be the good ending, so why aren't we rewarded with information? There should be a reward for doing good, right? Not just a couple of vague lines, I want some juicy details for having done the right thing! Still cool to win, though. 6/10.

Spoilers end here. Probably.



Gameplay
Both innovative and captivating, but occasionally dull. You find lots of endings, like the normal horror fare, but using a text adventure style. The consistent interface of "Look/Listen/Smell/Move" grants pretty much instant player familiarity. However, sometimes look/listen/smell feel arbitrary, since it's almost always the "move" function which actually *does* anything. What's the point of looking/smelling then (apart from gaining information about your surroundings)? I guess it's to warn you of bad endings, but you want to find all the endings anyway, right? I would have also liked some interesting point-and-click style puzzles to do, like the keys and stuff. I also found it was sometimes hard to track what endings you had done, although the save points were good indicators of this.

I find sometimes in text choices in RPG Maker, that the person is pressing space bar so often that they sometimes accidentally pick a choice. I did that quite often in this game. I'm not sure how to remedy this, but it's something to at least think about. Perhaps implementing a small wait function after some of the text, or a sound indicator that indicates a choice box is appearing.

There was also the factor of having to back out of the freezer and go back into the blue room to get that different ending. Because when I returned to the blue room, I didn't think me being in the red room had mattered at all. I thought it was just the same as coming back to the blue room before, because nothing had visually changed since I had last been in the blue room. I didn't feel that should have affected the ending.

Lasting Appeal
The game is unique in that it is a text adventure with a supremely good visual style, made in RPG Maker. I mean, I may be uninitiated in the genre, but it appealed to me and I think it's a unique game. I would like to see more mini, self-contained games like this in this genre, because I usually can't really stand a lot of action-filled horror games with jump scares and the like. There was only one thing close to a jump scare in this game (the Monster ending), and it wasn't even a jump scare, I just have a weak heart. But it's still a horror game. And I guess that's an achievement in a Hitchcock-ian kind of way.

Verdict
A wholly engrossing text adventure with a sleek visual style that is welcoming to newcomers. It has lots of cool endings, but some not-so-satisfying ones. But at least it's got a sweet mystery that will keep you thinking after the game is finished. And what's uncool about that? Nothing. Not anything is not cool nor uncool about not not playing this le gem. Benny out.

Presentation 9/10 - Very polished.
Graphics/Sound 9/10 - Really cool PNG's and MP3's from people with PhD's.
Story 7/10 - Brilliant pacing. Great mystery. Mixed bag of endings.
Gameplay 6.5/10 - Consistent but sometimes dull. A lot of arbitrary decisions too. Just my personal opinion.
Lasting Appeal 9/10 - Unique concept. Important ideas.

Overall 8.1/10 - Good. Solid.