I hate to say it, but I’ve come out of this game feeling pretty disappointed. I wouldn’t say I disliked it. It was trying to do some cool things but it fell flat for me.
First the things I liked:
The sound design was great at building atmosphere and the more visceral sound effects were really good.
The visual design was great, I loved the ps1 aesthetic.
The themes it was exploring were important.
Now onto my grievances.
First and most importantly is the characters. This ultimately, is a character focused game and I feel that the characters felt pretty flat and two dimensional. They felt more like surfaces to explore the themes than actual human beings. Granted, this is a short experience but I finished the game not feeling very connected to any of the characters or really feeling like they were true three dimensional characters trying to survive this situation. This is the biggest problem of the game for me as outside of the characters and sound/visual design there isn’t really much here.
The story is serviceable and I liked the location but again, it’s really more of a vehicle to explore the characters which I won’t go over again.
The pacing of the story felt a little off to me and seemed to slow down near the end where I was kind of getting a little fatigued.
The horror elements leaned more on disturbing than scary which is ok but there were sections that were trying to be scary but they didn’t really affect me YMMV.
In terms of gameplay, there basically isn’t any. It’s essentially a walking sim with no choices/consequences which is ok. However, there are a few light “Puzzle” sections if I can even call them that and I don’t think add anything really to the game other than kill the pacing a little bit.
The theme’s it was exploring were interesting but I feel like it was a bit heavy handed, especially towards the end.
All in all, it's not a bad experience by any means. I just felt a little disappointed, especially given the overwhelmingly positive reviews and relatively high price for the short experience.
