Had no idea what to expect coming into this, It looked like a tripple A great graphics easy third person combat game and under 10 hours so I installed it.
First impression was pretty good, the opening graphics are super impressive and the visuals are interesting, it introduces its self with being some sort of social commentary on mental illness and schizophrenia with voices whispering in your head constantly even narrating on what you do such as "Oh why arent you looking there? Look there, shes not looking" etc. This stuff was interesting at first
But as time went on, I discovered the game has basically absolutely nothing of substance to offer. The writing and voice acting became super grating and corny, forced melodrama, the constant whispering made me feel extremely sleepy everytime I played. The audio design sounds like a youtube ASMR session than a video game, it just makes me drousy. Always some low hushed melodramatic whispering in your ear over and over. Theres these 'lore stones' you can touch which is basically like some old asshole tells you Bible stories in a stupid over exaggerated voice. I really dont like any of the acting or story. The story essentially boils down to something like youre mentally ill in some viking norse mythology world, and your love interest got taken away by the Gods or some shit, and you go around trying to figure out where your poor highschool sweetheart went. Or some crap. Its so lame and corny, i barely gave a fuck
Besides the super boring snooze dialogue and story what is there? Well, pretty much nothing, and it only gets worse. The core gameplay consists of walking extremely slow, through admittedly beautiful landscapes, but thats all you do. The camera is shoved up your ass with a narrow FOV so you cant see anything, you walk/jog extremely slow. And all you do is walk around until you find a door with symbols on it, then you have to press 'Vision mode' and walk around in circles some more, trying to eyeball your way around the landscape to line up the symbols that show up on the door.
This is the main mechanic of the game. Its basically a really, really shit, boring Puzzle game with extremely intuitive, boring, shit puzzles. This is all you do for hours. You walk around with some ASMR whispering bullshit and calming music chiming in your ear about Bible Godz and melodramatic crap, then you find a door, then you have to walk around an arena in circles trying to line up your vision with whatever stupid bullshit in the environment creates the shape/symbol it needs. Sometimes you have to literally run through hoops and it somehow shifts the game world, but its extremely ambiguous and never really notifies you that anything changes - So again, you walk around in circles and circles for sometimes 20 minutes at a time, spamming the Vision mode button, trying to find some stupid shapes to unlock the door. This is about 75% of the game.
Sometimes, sporadically it will toss in some extremely easy half assed combat where it spawns a few enemies around you in a small area, and it auto locks onto them, and you basically spam X to kill them. There are other moves you can do, but its not nessesary because its so easy. The only point to do the other moves is because you get bored of spamming X. Sometimes with the combat a voice in back of your head will say "Behind you!" and then you press a parry button, and that felt kinda satisfying. And theres a slow mo ability that alllows you to just destroy everyone, but overall the combat felt generic, uninspired, unimportant, half assed, pathetic excuse to be able to say the game atleast contains combat.
In the last quarter of the game, it introduces a darkness mechanic where you die if you stay in the darkness, and you have to go around lighting fires and holding torches, yeah this wasnt any fun either because the graphic when youre in the darkness is flashing lights and impossible to see anything so youre basically fucked. Theres no penatly for dying, although in the beginning of the game it literally lies to you and says "this game has permadeath, if you die it deletes all your saves" - It actually doesnt. it just lies to you to make you feel on edge.So when you die all that happens is you respawn at a close checkpoint and you get some black shit on your arm? dont know. its stupid. The game has one boss fight. One. I beat the boss in like 2 minutes by spamming roll, slow mo, and X button. Shit game.
Theres no upgrades, abilities, new items, armors, new weapons nothing. Theres nothing to do. You just walk around and do awful puzzles.
Thats all the game has to offer. A boring tedious walking sim with extremely frustrating unitutivie totally bullshit excuse for 'puzzles' that consist of looking for god damn Wheres Waldo shapes with your vision and medicore combat. Theres nothing to even say for 'level design' because how could there be? Theres barely a game here. Its basically a tedious fucking audiobook where you walk around slowly and listen to retards voice act in the most eye rolling cringe inducing way coupled with ASMR whispering constantly that makes you wanna fall asleep. I could actually not stomach playing this garbage for more than 40-60 minutes at a time, which is rare for video games to be that boring , but this one really was. At the end of the game it tries to make some kind of deep enlightened philosophical insight on death but it just came across as tryhard cliche and cringy. Nothing in this game felt like it meshed together well, the combination of norse mythology and mental illness? the bizarre shit puzzles constantly? the overdramatic melodrama in your ears? its just a stupid combination. This game blows and I cant believe its rated so fucking highly and people seemingly love it, a total travesty.
3/10