I have some extremely mixed feelings about this game. I came into it hoping for an experience analogous to Proteus or Shape of the World, and got something quite different. It remains to be seen exactly how much this has colored my view, but I suspect some of my initial disappointment which opened me up to see the flaws I now see was due to that. I should also mention that I too am a game developer and, to a certain extent, I see some of what's being said in Pattern in myself and the way I think about my projects.
Some of the ideas and techniques presented here are phenomenal, so in no particular order, here are the notable pros I see:
1) The concepts involved, "narratively"-speaking, and the way they're weaved into the procedural levels is quite interesting. I enjoyed wandering around these strange, sometimes liminally-charged, spaces just thinking about what the placement of these objects might represent and why this-or-that choice in was made in the construction of this game.
2) The art style and model choices were well founded and all make sense together. It's a darn pretty game, to be sure. Of particular note for me were the texture used for the starry nights, as well as the wake/rest screen-space effect. Very very interesting and whoever came up with those should be commended.
3) Procedural music is HARD, and this game appears to have an idea about what its soundscape should be like, and I think what comes together while playing is very evocative. I use the word "evocative" rather than "pleasant" only because there are certain segments which evoke actual dread and I can't bring myself to describe the feeling as necessarily positive, but any word in line with "vivid", "evocative", etc works quite well.
Now, with all those being said, I have a parallel set of gripes for each of them which, unfortunately, pulled me out of the experience too much to be able to recommend this game to anyone outside of developers interested in a unique case study. Here's the less fun parts:
1) While the narrative idea is solid, it's my opinion that any narrative which is told through non-diegetic popup text is inherently weaker for it. So much so that I believe the idea should be scrapped if you can come up with no other method of telling your story. It's also worth pointing out that some of this narrative text is missing punctuation, which I suppose may add to the "rawness factor" if that's what you're into, but for me came off as unprofessional. The last gripe I have, narratively-speaking, is one particular line about "having the scars to prove it", which may have significant meaning to the developer, but comes off as a bit edgy, and not in a cool way.
2) From a visual-design standpoint, there's some things that could use improvement. Particularly in the case of wandering through trees, sometimes you'll end up with a completely monotone'd screen for 3-5 seconds at a time, which, in my opinion, should be a "never" event (as it can appear to the player as though some sort of glitch has occurred). Additionally from a more technical perspective, there is a noticeable amount of pop-in for objects being rendered which should've been avoided either through more optimized rendering or through some kind of visual effect to soften the blow, and the sudden shift in lighting conditions when moving from day to night or vice-versa is startling and does not give off the appearance of being intentional.
3) The soundscape is, as I said, very evocative and emotionally charged, which is quite impressive for procedural generation. That being said, I think the constraints used to prevent anything from sounding "wrong" ultimately led to music which is very one-note. I was emotionally affected by the music, but there was nothing particularly surprising to me about it. There was never that moment that we all search for when making procedural music where we say "oh man I didn't know it could do that!", which ultimately leaves the whole thing feeling a bit wanting. On the audio-technical side I also have a few gripes: popping occurs due to a lack of ramp-up/ramp-down policy. As an audio programmer, I'm very saddened by this. Further, it's not well-communicated how your location and environment interact with the soundscape and should've been made more obvious to the player both from a visual and sonic perspective.
To be very clear: I don't hate this game. I'm not planning on refunding it. I think it gave me a significant number of things to think about for my own professional development. I just can't, in good faith, recommend this to anyone who's not already so heavily invested in the genre that they'll buy this game before looking at reviews.
