This game has a very cool core concept that's sometimes hard to appreciate because of various aspects of its design. The main idea behind it is a branching dialogue adventure where you guide your friend Valerie out of a laboratory. This guiding involves two extra steps, keeping track of her on a map, and keeping track of facility power to make sure she's not in danger. Besides that, you also get a ton of downtime to explore a guard booth. The branching dialogue works great and is easily the best part of the game. There are tons of different paths the conversation can get into. Even similar seeming sets of options frequently lead to different dialogue. It feels like Valerie really is reacting to what you say most of the time and not just stuck on some script. Valerie's voice actress is also great. Her performance is just as good, if not better, than the acting in many big budget games, and she adds a lot to the experience.
The fact that there are so many conversation possibilities should increase the game's replay value a lot. But there are several factors that hinder it here. First is the booth downtime. There are lots of breaks between conversations where you get to just chill out in your booth. There are many items to interact with, which is kind of neat, but the interaction is done at a surface level. You can pick things up and throw them and that's basically it for most objects. It feels like the developers figured out how to make physics work, thought it was cool, and left it in the game without any real implementation beyond the barebones. There are a few secrets in the booth that don’t really lead to much and some long notes to read that I didn't care about. It's kind of cool to go through the booth once, but after realizing that the interactions in it are so shallow, there isn't any reason to explore more. Since you can't skip these booth waiting sequences, in future playthroughs, there wind up being long periods of downtime where you essentially do nothing.
Second, you can't skip the dialogue. While there's a lot of unique dialogue and it's all very well acted, there are plenty of sections where there's only one thing in the script. This is entirely fair, since these are moments where the gameplay mechanics are explained or the starts of big story moments. After hearing them once though, there's no reason to hear them again on future playthroughs if you don't want to. There's also a long unskippable flashback sequence where you slowly walk forward, which feels like a waste of time even the first time it's introduced.
Third, the gameplay for keeping Valerie alive is shallow. The main aspect involves guiding her through a map. The baseline for this is implemented fairly well. She starts off in a random room, the closest exit to her is dangerous, and the path to the next closest exit is a bit convoluted. You have to keep track of where she is and work out a path for her. While this feels reasonably exciting at first, a few problems arise. The map has several pins you can interact with. This made me think that I would be tracking Valerie's position, along with the positions of several dangers and would be adapting on the fly to guide her through them. It turns out that you only track Valerie's position and nothing else. The consequence of this is that the main gameplay aspect is solved basically as soon as the map is introduced. You can calculate the best path then and just stick to it from that point on. Since nothing dynamic happens after you get Valerie's initial position, there's no reason to ever deviate from what you planned out initially. You do still need to track her on the map and confirm the right directions, but it feels like a formality more than anything else.
The other gameplay aspect is keeping track of facility power. If the power in Valerie's sector is out, she can be killed, so you need to order power reroutes to avoid that. As with the map mechanic, I originally thought there would be more to this, like that you'd order power routed to various sectors to keep Valerie safe. But no, you just have to reset the power every now and then and that's it. I really disliked this mechanic. It was mindless enough to not be engaging, but you couldn't just ignore it because otherwise Valerie would die. It means that at a certain point, you're left with the busywork of constantly monitoring the power system between conversations, which takes the mandatory downtime into this state where it's both boring and a bit stressful at the same time, but the bad kind of stressful. Even if you want to interact with the booth stuff at that time, you have to occasionally check the power, which means that you can't even focus on the other stuff.
Despite these issues, I think this game is still definitely worth playing. The complaints here aren’t as big a deal on a first or even second playthrough when you’re still getting used to the mechanics. And the character interactions and Valerie’s performance are both very well done.
