A looping game where you investigate “anomalies” to question deceptive masks and find a way out, held back by unnecessary stamina and flashlight mechanics.
While working in train tunnels, you spot a mask on the ground that causes you to faint. When you wake up, you find yourself in what looks like a normal train tunnel, except for a skeleton wearing a strange mask and a tape recorder on the ground that reveals his final words. It seems you are stuck in a loop, and the only way out is to look for anomalies and ask questions to two masks.
The first moments of the game will probably annoy you because of restrictions that do not add anything meaningful and instead spoil the fun you could have had. I am talking about the stamina system, which drains quickly while running and recharges very slowly, and the flashlight, whose batteries run out. Although new batteries are everywhere, the mechanic feels pointless and only inflates playtime, since you have to search for them just to see in the dark, and you have to do it while walking because stamina takes too long to start recovering.
If you manage to push through these initial restrictions, you can get some entertainment out of the game as long as you stick to its rules. Instead of spotting anomalies with your own eyes, you must interact with them to unlock questions for the two masks. If you do not interact with an object, the questions will not appear. The problem is that the anomalies are not really anomalies at all, but rather completely normal objects.
In the first stage, a tape recorder, a phone, and a newspaper are counted as anomalies. There is nothing unusual about them except for a visual prompt that appears when you get close. This could have been handled much better, since the prompt is barely visible and easy to miss. The only advice I can give is to mash the left mouse button while walking so you do not miss anything; You only need to be near an object to interact with it, without having to look at it directly.
Interacting with as many anomalies as possible is important because of how the two masks work. The catch is that both masks lie or give vague answers, but while one always lies, the other tells the truth occasionally. When you find an anomaly, both masks unlock two or three questions about it, but you can only ask one question per anomaly to each mask. You might get lucky early on and spot the truth by asking the same question to both masks, but most of the time you will need multiple anomalies so you can ask more questions.
Once you find the first truthful answer, you know that the other mask lies all the time. This is crucial, because you need to ask the confirmed liar which path to take and then choose the opposite of what it suggests. In my first few runs, I made the mistake of asking the mask that had previously told the truth about the path. If it has already told one truth, it will definitely lie when it comes to choosing the path.
You do not need to find every anomaly, and you can also rely on luck by rushing straight into one of the tunnels without asking any questions. However, every mistake sends you back to the first stage. When you choose the correct path, the ambient color changes, the stage number increases, and you must search for new anomalies. Across the eight stages, they collectively reveal the full story. There are a few creepy scenes and one very bad and annoying jumpscare in the first stage, but overall the game is fairly mild.
The good news is that each stage has preset anomalies, meaning their locations and contents never change. Even if you are sent back to the first stage, you will already know where the anomalies are, allowing you to trigger them quickly and focus on finding the truthful answer. While audio recordings require you to remember important details, written anomalies can be “cheated” by taking screenshots. After a few attempts, you will know most of the story and will not struggle much with identifying the truth.
After beating the game, which must be done in a single playthrough because there is no saving, you unlock an endless mode that adds random effects. In this mode, stages have random anomalies in random locations. The goal is to beat 50 stages to earn the final achievements, but this is not particularly difficult.
First, choosing the wrong tunnel only drops you back one or two stages instead of resetting you to the beginning. Second, the final achievement appears to be bugged or needs a better description, since you do not actually need to complete all 50 stages in one run. I played endless mode twice and earned the achievement on my second attempt at around stage 22. This suggests that the game tracks each correct tunnel choice across multiple runs and awards the achievement once you have chosen correctly 50 times in total.
