A really solid indie survival horror-immersive sim, clearly taking a lot of inspiration from System Shock & Dead Space, but I think this does enough to just kind of be its own thing in that vein, it doesn't copy-paste the arsenal, enemies or all of the plot beats or every single mechanic, but does its own mix without feeling like it's missing any vital ingredient.
As an indie game, credits seemed to list 2 main devs with some publisher help in localization and 2 artists and someone who did the music-- I'll point out the obvious, there's going to be some cut corners, the biggest is the repetitive environments, the Base you're exploring has a ton of sectors (24, though some, I forget how many, were collapsed sectors with maybe 1-3 rooms accessible) and each is built under a similar blueprint, with 5 levels you traverse with the elevator or ladder, and the rooms can look similar as well.
Now this doesn't mean the developers just copy-pasted sectors 20+ times, they still changed things around, environmental detailing is different around the base, & it tries to somewhat have themes for each sector (lab, barracks, reactor, vault, recreation, stuff like that) to vary how they're decorated, their function & look. So effort did go into it, it's just that if you've felt that environments get samey in space station/ship/base/colony games like System Shock, Dead Space, Alien Isolation etc, then know here's indies following in those footsteps with a smaller budget & less asset variety.
- This bleeds into another minor critique I have in that because of the environments being more similar than already in this genre, the player could really use an overarching map that they can browse & see doors they've come across with different security clearance levels marked & other info about power, oxygen, routes that are blocked etc, because it can easily get to the point where you don't remember where you saw some level 6 or 7 security clearance door on which of the 20+ sectors. Luckily they're relatively small & sprint is pretty generous so you can brute force your way sector-by-sector, but I almost recommend following the story lineraly until you get security 8 & then just combing over from top to bottom all previous areas for loot hoarding (though that comes with downsides like getting the shotgun late into the game when you can grab it early, same with sledgehammer).
There are a handful of difficulty spikes, the game being driven by systems can have some escalating damage if you get procced by multiple acid splashes for instance in quick succession.
Some people might find the retro UI confusing to navigate, personally I got used to it pretty quickly (then again I'm a fossil), got to apply [v] before exiting [x]
I guess my obligatory combat hit feedback critique applies here, I always prefer more salient enemy flinching animations & pain states over something like a crosshair hit confirmation X, but that doesn't mean this game doesn't have some flinching animations, it does, & weapons do feel punchy in all other areas, from sound design, animations, particles, & even damage output can be pretty good, I overall liked the combat even with my usual sticking point.
That's kind of the end of my noteworthy critiques, otherwise, it's just well-rounded & fun game, it's got all the systems in place & working in unison, with upgrades to your hp, armor, stamina, carry weight, modules, weapon damage, clip sizes, to a varied arsenal of a decent knife, pistol, SMG, shotgun, grenade launcher, tripwire mines, sledgehammer & gauss rifle that all felt good to use. Enemy variety was decent as well, annoying spiders, fast melee zombies, tankier slower melee/spitter zombies, crawlers, specialized spitters, vent turrets, ceiling crawlers, heavies & a couple of boss fights. You've got inventory management, storage boxes,exploration with loot & upgrade points to find in hidden places, you can bypass some areas with some box stacking or hanging onto gadgets like jammers or door hackers which can get you quickly to higher clearance areas. The game also has randomized modules you can equip that can boost stats from hp, armor, speed, flashlight, regen, melee and more.
I guess I would have liked the option to scrap or sell useless modules at the vending machines for some credits, & for the storage box to have an ability to scroll & add more loot than just the fixed grid spaces would allow, but those are again more minor nits I picked up just now.
I guess on the subject of even more petty small nits is that I'm not a huge fan of Unity engines SSAO/HBAO implementation which somehow looks worse than Unreal (and UE isn't much better), but the game is kind of built with ambient occlusion in mind, I tried with it off & some places just look too flat so had to suffer with the downsides to benefit otherwise from the shading enhancements. But outside of that the game looks great, at least in my nostalgia-goggles eyeballs who loves that 2004-2009 look of games, this has great dynamic lighting/shadowing, & props to good options allowing us to disable most postprocessing like chromatic aberration, vignette, film grain and more, I kind of wish bloom had a slider instead of just an on/off toggle, but better without than full bloomy.
Performance was mostly solid outside of some fire areas like first bossfight was laggy. But everything maxed out 1080p 60fps 99% of the time on my laptop, Ryzen 5 7535HS, 4060RTX, 16GBRAM, Win11. No crashes, no stutters, no softlocks (well, there was one wall with no collision that I walked through & got scared that I was out of bounds, but I could just walk right back in, I was jumping around trying to find hidden loot on shelves so it's not something most people will run into unless they're loot goblins climbing everything).
I'm bad at judging stories because I've grown with 90's & 00's games where writing was an afterthought in many cases (especially FPS games), but this had some cool twists & wrinkles, there are definitely some elements that are lifted straight from its influences, but I think it did a good job of blending it all in. Voice acting was okay, stiff at times but mostly solid, the fact that there even was voice acting with a couple of scripted sequences alone beef up the production value which isn't something you can say of most indie games.
This was a really fun time & I can definitely see myself replaying it with the modifiers in the future, I'm slow & also got a bit lost (I missed that judiciary ladder was climbable lol) so my first playthrough took me 10 hours but I've seen people finish it in 3-4, but for the solid package with some added replay value I think it's worth the price.
