Somerville Review (MrZeebub)
This didn't really click for me. I feel as though the developers intended to do what Limbo/Inside/Planet of Lana had done, but tried to do it bigger and better. And somewhere along the way, they lost sight of the point.
It has janky controls. They added a 3rd dimension to the movement in most scenes, which doesn't make them better. You can get caught on geometry quite often. Often times, it's unclear what areas they intend you to go, and which ones you can't go at all. Sometimes, the path looks impassable. Sometimes, your eye is drawn to irrelevant parts of the screen, making you believe that you should investigate that further. Except that you can't. There's only three buttons in the game: Ability 1, Ability 2, and 'Do Stuff.' You don't jump, climb, or run unless the game wants you to. It removes any semblance of player agency.
The gameplay is unclear. There isn't a clear explanation as to how your abilities work. You just have to experiment and figure it out. I wouldn't think that was a bad thing, except that I went through 80% of the game before I discovered that I was totally wrong the whole time. They had plenty of opportunity to clue me in, and they failed the whole time.
The story is unclear. I'm not gonna spoil anything, because I can't. I have no idea what this game was about. And it wasn't until I reached the end that I looked at a guide that explained to me that I should have spent the whole game decoding alien messages that I was supposed to have noticed.
It's slow. Your movement speed is slow. The areas are huge. It takes forever to do stuff. It's just a lost of wasted time. It's like they were worried people could complete the game and still get a refund.
It crashes randomly. I had to live stream the game in order for my wife to enjoy it, also. Playing on our living room PC, the game crashed to desktop at the same point, no matter what I did. So, I played it on a different PC to get around the problem. I'm not the only person that's reported such issues, and they are still experiencing them at the time of writing. No word on whether they are ever going to fix those problems.
I think the game is high in concept, and low in polish. It's vibes first, and gameplay second. And that's not a design philosphy that I can respect.
If you're desperate for another game of this kind, maybe wait for a sale. Hopefully, you get more out of it than I did.