Well, I sure wished there was a neutral button, this game deserves that.
On the bright side is the art style and the atmosphere, they are built well, no rooms look like they have been copy/pasted, background music is nice and chill, it has voice acting and it tackles a story about a subject I never saw covered, Dr. Livingstone.
But that is about it for the good stuff. On the other side, the game has some horrendous controls, tedious exploration, tiny interactive areas, hard to see objects and meaningless side interactions.
Starting with the controls, the movement itself feels sluggish, and the crouch is even worse, you can barely move while crouching, meaning, you gotta stand up – walk – crouch – stand up again – walk – crouch (repeat as many times needed). And the controls for puzzle aren’t much better. The puzzles themselves I do not mind, but the tediousness of the controls is what makes them harder that they should be. The game has those kind of controls where you gotta spin the mouse around or drag a lever while holding the mouse button, but they are bad, often times I found myself dragging the mouse into the second monitor, or making circles with the mouse only for the object to spin the other way or spazz around.
As for tedious exploration, is about the fact that you spend way too much opening all kind of doors, drawers. The problem is that there are way too many of them, with many being totally empty or having non-interactive objects.
Puzzles and some objects have very tiny interactive areas, and what I mean by this is that some puzzles have interactive zones which are very little. Things like buttons, drag points, etc… and the game is not forgiving, your cursor gotta be pixel perfect placed over whatever you are trying to interact with. I would say that some puzzles would really need a zoom in/out function.
Hard to see objects are tied to the previous point. Some objects you need for puzzles blend in too damn much with the rest of the environment. As an example I can name the puzzle in the last room, where the item I needed was in a drawer which barely opened half way, so I had to almost clip through the wall just to find the damn thing. Another, was a book related one where you had to press numbered books in a certain order, but these books almost blended with other environmental ones which too had numbers on them.
Final point is not that bad but just a let down. Is about the fact that most items you can look at have no value, all this does is just to zoom in on them, things like sculptures or paintings. But some do trigger small dialogues adding a bit to the story, so it was possible to add a bit of flavor text to them, which means it was possible to further enhance the atmosphere of visiting an explorer’s home.
So, this game for me was a hit and miss, some puzzles were fine others were a pain, controls are ok for walking around but not for anything else, the story is short but not very deep and it involves reading notes/letters to find out more, a few objects needed for puzzles are easy to find but unfortunately many others are frustrating. Still, I would not say this game is worth the full price, but I saw it on a sale for 2-3 $, for that price, I would say yeah, that’s better. Enthusiasts of escape room genres might find it enjoyable, and it has a demo, so give that a try first. But regarding this, I gotta say, I got no idea why it is described as a reverse esc room, cuz for me an esc-room is a kind of game where you pass through a room or series of rooms in order to reach a goal, escaping the room is the usual goal but in this game is finding your friend. So, it is the same process just with another goal/end.
