Subnautica but unoriginal and unfunny. The game has exactly one gag: Haha Corporation bad. *Laugh track*
And then proceeds to run with it for the entire game.
The game loop is the same as Subnautica but poorer in most regards, the game goes as far as sidedly commenting some decisions are due to dev lazyness. And devs, you can only allude to that so many times until it stops being a joke.
Kudos to the art team for Carrying HARD. The visuals and the art style and composition are one of the few elements that are truly good. The subnautica but space setup allows them to animate much much less. As the play areas is essentially a static asset. But the experience is consistently enjoyable, visually.
The game makes more effort on playing witty quips than relaying how to accomplish the next step set. Visual storytelling is okay but often goes nowhere practical and i've had to alt tab to check for an answer at least twice. Both times the answer was: You need this thing that we never mentioned you need, or the steps to procure it. Apparently having the player stumble and jump through hoops is good game design.
The game is also really big on purposefully padding the experience and is sometimes self defeating. The narration seems to insist on the players avatar being a dumbass which gets old fast.
The main level design challenge to the player is....that stuff is really far. That's it. Your breath bar severly limits your ability to work with what would otherwise be a linear travel.
Examples:
-The freeze hazard will block out 95% of your vision and you can do little about it, preventing you from enjoying the open space vistas which are one of the main selling points.
-The game will make a beat about your gramps back scratcher, but wont actually tell you it does not work for picking items up, you need craft (and likely an annoying back and forth trip) to have that land.
-At one point the game directs you to ..."interact" with other space suits, which are very far. Turns out the objective is to interact with your own and the trip was entirely pointless....then the game sends you back to where you were.
This needs to be said again, the game's main selling point and appeal is "Liked Subnautica? Play this!" And hypothetically, in a world where Subnautica never happened and this was a fully original production. It would still be kinda unapealling.
Since we have space soviet esthetic: For a game, Not Great, Not Terrible. Nothing to bad but it quickly becomes obvious the dev team ran short of content and had to artifically inflate playtime. Characters are rather forgetable and sometimes unappealing. The fact breathedge 2 is now out and this game is was given for free further complicates this theory.
I will at least try to finish this, if only to get some closure as to where this mess goes. But I feel that simply by disabling breath bar and speeding up flight time would shorten the game with no other meaningful impact.
