Where do i even start? I don't want to waste time but still wanna finish the game due to my completionist nature, although it's a painful one to play. Less than 2h was enough to get bored and i LOVE walking simulators, i enjoyed Everybody's Gone to the Rapture a lot. So imagine how slow and boring this one is. It has misleading trailer which implies there's exploration and gameplay but it's so slow that you stop caring about anything. By the time the talking is done you can go to the bathroom and make coffee and come back right on time of another painfully slow walking section.
You must walk in a predetermined path even though the areas seem open, there are invisible walls everywhere. You can't run for more than 2s so you walk slowly, you basically crawl around until you bump into one of the "correct" paths. And then stare at the rock while listening to some boring dialogue instead of having a cut-scene or something. Then you phase out for a second and miss the dialogue choice because it's hard to notice when it pops up when you're so focused on looking at your phone because you were bored so much.
You see the objective but it's behind that "huge" 30cm rock. So you must crawl around it and climb a 2 meter wall to reach it. That's how painful it is.
Oh yeah the caharactyer has amensia of course.
Map is useless and confusing.
No mini-map for some reason.
No waypoints.
It's an audiobook.
Sluggish, unresponsive, painful controls.

This could've been a nice TellTale-like game but instead it's a visualised audiobook where you have to crawl around to turn the page.

I am the exact target audience for this game (30+ white dude) and I found it overall to be pretty good, if somewhat plodding and dry. The aesthetics are incredible, perfectly capturing 60s retro sci-fi in both the visual splendor of the planetary and cosmic vistas, as well as the look and feel of the World of Tomorrow style space age technology.

The story is pretty good, but I think it's bogged down a bit by budget limitations. It's one of those games where you can tell the developers had to look for ways to limit how often you see moving NPCs on screen. Other than a few heavily scripted flashbacks, you only have physical interactions (very mild spoiler) with one person the entire game, who doesn't even appear until the final hour or so. The game is always contriving ways for you to stumble onto things after they happen so that the animators don't have to spend resources on showing it. Nobody Wants to Die and Firewatch both did this, and it was also cringe as hell in both of those games. Instead of burning a hole in the game's budget to show you stuff in present tense, you and your radio buddy constantly talk and react to what you're seeing, like you're investigating a crime scene. It's just kind of a dry, utilitarian way of delivering story beats, and after a while I started to feel emotionally tapped out a bit.

However, the atmosphere and visual design are so impressive that they are able to carry the experience past the flat notes of the story and uplift it into something that's worthwhile for fans of hard science fiction. It's a decent, 7/10 walking sim narrative game.

Дуже затягнута гра. Десь три рази думав, що гра ось-ось закінчиться і стається "неочікуваний поворот" і гра продовжується. Це був би плюс, якби гра мала цікаві механіки, але бродити туди-сюди по однотипним пустелям стає нудно