What an excruciating experience.
Games often have a problem: they make you do something by trying to translate individual steps of the action into gameplay, often literally. Move this switch. Swing that axe. And so on. But you're not swinging the axe, you're just pressing a button, or moving the mouse. It doesn't [i]feel[/i] like you're swinging the axe (unless it does, of course). So the experience of your character and of you, the player, aren't exactly aligned. Immersion fades.
A Forgetful Loop - pardon the title, I promise the game is better - has you control a group of scientists as they scramble to modify a machine that's got them stuck in a time loop from within the confines of that loop. What makes this problematic is the fact that the loop is roughly 30 seconds long. If that sounds like an absolute existential nightmare to you, congrats - you'll probably find it easy to tune in on the vibes.
Oh, and if that's not messy enough for you, not everyone is aware of the loop, and other weird shenanigans occur, such as... ah, no, I won't spoil.
And what the game does perfectly is make you [i]FEEL[/i] like you're in that lab with them, scrambling as they go, trying to repeat tasks on muscle memory, all the while planning ahead, hoping that it will maybe work this time, trying to make the slightest bit of difference. And that's what makes the game so excruciating.
It's a good thing, by the way. Every now and then you're treated to a story bit - the scientists talk, work, scream, cry, make out, get hurt. You really start caring about these guys who otherwise would be just icons in your HUD - hell, even as the game fleshes out the characters, their tooltips expand and add more little facts about them. You empathise with them. You, as you play, are stuck in the loop with them, scrambling as they do.
And of course this is saying nothing of the [i]reason[/i] why this infernal machine was even built. There is quite a reason, let me tell you.
So the game is essentially a timed puzzle. Luckily, it's not just a speedrun; the time loop is not exactly a time loop, some things either stay done or are much easier to do in the next loop. So many loops will be less about solving the given problem and more about exploration and preparation. And even then, there was a whole total of ONE level where I felt like I need to scramble for these tenths of a second, executing a complex at a speed I thought impossible. Luckily, this level is pretty late in the game, and even though it was quite difficult, I still managed to nail it after some 5-10 tries, max.
The puzzle develops nicely. Each chapter brings a new mechanic, gives you a few tutorial missions where you can play with it without the complexity of a whole level, and of course uses all the mechanics found in previous levels. So the game never gets dull; the puzzle design is excellent.
What is not so excellent is the UI. At first its not so bad, but as the puzzles reach higher levels of complexity you're really starting to notice all its shortcomings. After all, if things must be done quickly, you'll end up relying on hotkeys almost exclusively - and you can't rebind them. The default (and only) bindings are okay, but there were moments I wish I could mix them up a bit.
But the more annoying thing is only becoming visible in the last two chapters. The puzzles are getting huge, far bigger than the screen. Normally, you deal with it with either zooming out or panning. But here, there's a limit to how much you can zoom out. It's impossible to see everything. Which, in turn, sometimes made me forget that there's a time-sensitive piece on the other side of the screen which I forgot about. That was insanely frustrating. As for panning - you can drag everything around, but panning is FAR too slow and the only hotkeys to do it are the arrow keys. You will not be using the arrow keys unless you have three arms.
Oh, and what's wrong with dragging, you probably are wondering. For the most part it works fine, but it's possible to click on an assigned worker by mistake, and one click like this can ruin your carefully constructed machine, and you won't even know what exactly happened. Now that I think about it, that's actually pretty immersive.
Two final minor complaints: the writing. The story is good, but it reads like a light novel. It's stale like that piece of bread that's still in your bag. Flat like your gf from back in middle school. That makes it concise, sure, but it's not pleasant to read. At least until the characters start talking, because somehow the dialogue is human and vibrant.
Sadly, it's a little difficult to visualise who exactly is talking. Characters are colour-coded, but there's a lot of them. Fourteen in total, out of which eight are the focus of the story; In the game, they're marked by little symbols representing what they do - this guy manages electricity, this woman is responsible for the timey stuff, and so on. But I barely could put a name to the symbol. If the story pieces had portraits - or hell, the symbols were replaced with even a simplest representation of a person - I think I would've found it much easier.
Still, it's excellent. It hits you very, very hard, and is a blast to play - even if it is a kind of suffering. It's the good kind, though. Just pretend the game is called "The Chronon Hypothesis" or something like that, and you're golden.
Oh, the music's great, too.
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