Interesting design; providing you with a text-driven, time-sensitive, rogue-like, choice-based experience with a Commodore kind of visual design. If you can get into these particular styles and ideas, you probably are going to like this game. But only- LIKE. It feels like a love letter to games like Maniac Mansion and CLEARLY movies like The Thing, but lacks the divergent branches and real terrors that Carpenter movies and the SCUMM games were famous for.
The gameplay feels like it probably started as something more ambitious, but this completed build feels under-baked in almost all aspects. Basic gameplay is this, your scientific crew are trying to break some ice sheets for science, but nobody returns the keys back to where they're supposed to go, so you need to go TALK to everyone to find them, all while your energy, hygiene and ability to stay away depletes. This talking is the problem, because after the chaos is released, and crew members become fewer, and the halls grow more empty, the TALKING is what's going to get you in trouble as you try to open all the outpost's doors. Once you unleash the horrors of the icy depths, one of your mates becomes an abomination, that's slowly killing off the crew. Your job is to stop the monster.
So, seems kinda cool, right? Each game starts with a randomized set of characters, so you won't know that "Bob Johnson" has that first key you need, nor will you know that "Fred Smith" is the monster. However, this leads to characters who are very cookie-cutter, and with 8 of them and most dying off screen while you're using 60% of your energy to move anywhere to do anything, it doesn't feel like you could've done fudge all to prevent their deaths, and so they're just there to be killed or drop keys. There just feels like a more interesting concept here if each crew member had a role, like engineer, or medic, and you could ask them to do tasks, like open a passage or heal someone else, and you COULD be accidentally assigning the creature in disguise. Instead, the monster just kind of walks around and kills anyone at anytime and they don't seem that bothered by all of this.
My biggest problem is that if we're going to make the rest of the crew simply a key shuffler, then you've gotta make the monster intimidating and fun to get around. In a lot of ways, the faux-amiga graphics do help with the Lovecraft horrors of something incomprehensible. The actual transformation is surprising and works well within one's own imagination. However, then it just stands there, waiting for your text-based move, meaning the fights always have the correct solution to remove oneself from it, and sadly, the game can get hung up in a stalemate like situation when you're trying to leave the corner of the map after the crew mindlessly walks into it's maw. The monster can only be distracted if you're holding something; a reel of film, dynamite, a fully loaded gun. So, you grab the object you need, run into the monster, throw said object, run back, and hope you can wait, shuffle and avoid the AI so you can get past without having to use the object as a distraction. It's one trick, and once you figure it out, it kinda makes the one and only antagonist (one "Chad David") kind of a joke. In Maniac Mansion, walking into the wrong room could get you in trouble with Edna, so having to quickly point and click your way out of bad situations gave the player agency.
But does this game have a deep and interesting story if you're looking for it? No. It doesn't have that either. It's an hour and a half experience, that you wish were deeper and longer. Buy it on sale. This feels like a first game, and would PROBABLY be better suited for itch.io or NG, BUT I did have fun with it despite all these negatives. There's a much better game beyond this experience, and I hope Brandon takes this concept and expands upon it because what the game does nail pretty well is tone.
