Update July 2010: Apparently the game has recently been patched to playability so this review might not accurately reflect how the game plays anymore.

Alright disclaimer. I wanted to finish this game before writing it off but I didn't. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was after a gigantic scene of exposition after which I couldn't save. I ran to the first save point I knew existed. And the result?
"Gayfag! Are you crazy, we'll be trapped in there."

Well yeah. That killed me and meant I would have to go through a series of actions AGAIN.

It wasn't the first time something like this happened. After an initial good impression of a slow moving atmospheric horror-esque game monsters started appearing and I died. Twice. Then I went to the walkthrough.

Well, first the good. The opening is not bad. Walking through an abandoned complex. I can get behind that.

That's about it really. The gameplay is fairly atrocious. The game is pretty much trial and error and the fact that monsters keep moving while you examine stuff means there's rarely enough time to examine anything. Mostly because of the little annoyance I found annoying before any monsters showed up.

The text speed. There are breaks nearly everywhere. Examining a broken chair will give a message that goes something like this: "It's a chair <pause> it's fallen over <pause> it seems broken." Three pauses for a generic description. Mistakenly pressing enter on the item and that whole thing happens again.

Nearly every message box in this game has a pause in it. If that's not bad for the nerves I don't know what is. The survival tips encourage the player to examine everything because there may be helpful items. Well I just didn't want to examine anything because I knew it meant 30 seconds of pausing. (and with the monsters closing in that's 30 seconds no one has)

This game is deadly. Well deadly games have worked before but this game also committs the sin of bad save point placement. Save points happen occasionally but never when they're needed. In a game as deadly as this a player just doesn't want to backtrack too much after a loaded save. (see the topic "Why does dying have to suck?" on the forums. There's discussion and this game is exactly the kind of thing that should be avoided) A lot of the frustrations in this game could have been helped by a simple checkpoint system or more generous save points (save anywhere could have saved this game in my book).

For the story and atmosphere it is okay. I didn't get far enough in I suppose but there were some hints at good stuff. Again the pausing in every text did make a lot of it tedious and while I was interested in every scrap of paper in the beginning I wanted them just to go away before the end). Some of the puzzles seemed a bit dumb though I like the concept of having to make the player think out of game and perhaps even bring a pen and paper so kudos to that.

There were also some jump scares. They felt kinda stupid. I'm sure they were explained later on though, somewhere where I didn't get. I jumped at the jump-scares so I guess they served their purpose but apart from the first one (with the monsters split-second appearing) they weren't too effective.

Overall this is a game that does have some good ideas. But the horrible gameplay drags it down into the mud. The hurt-detection just isn't that great. In fact most things about the gameplay isn't that great. This would have worked a lot better as a less deadly game. The thing about deadly games is that you can make deadly games as long as the systems are good enough that every death is the player's fault. In this game most of the deaths were just because of the game itself. And how sloppy it is. (One prime example is walking into a door-corridor thing and finding the door locked. Well while the player finds out, in a three-paused dialog box, that the door is locked monsters have closed in and the player will have no way of backing out of that place. Leaving it an instant game over and reload)

This game made me swear. It sucks.